My friends! Many a newsletter has been written since we last spoke over the summer solstice… but they remain locked away in my drafts because life kept changing, and each newsletter became more irrelevant to the present day than the last. So now here I am, postpartum and someone new. Maybe I’ll publish them another time, but for now I go outside and look at the leaves that dust the street in their piles, soggy and golden, and I marvel at the fact that I never witnessed one fall. Autumn has slipped away in the blink of an eye.
When autumn was in full swing I had a baby. When I was pregnant, I applied for a grant to have a doula via the Doula Access Fund, and I was lucky enough to be successful in getting a few free hours of help from a doula called H.
Doula
/ˈduːlə/
noun
A woman employed to provide guidance and support to the mother of a newborn baby.
So here I am, baby free in Caffe Nero for 60 precious minutes (51 minutes as I type!) while H watches the baby, and it feels strange. There’s a sense of euphoria to be an individual again for the afternoon, someone who drinks coffee and takes up table space with their laptop, and I guess I feel guilty for the joy I feel at having the ability to do something I really took for granted. 'Me' time will never be the same. But prioritising ‘me’ time will make me a better mother, I tell myself, and pray it’s true.
When it comes down to it, reclaiming my identity post-birth has been found through the little things - like putting my favourite earrings on and a bold lipstick even if my hair is greasy. Colour coordination. Going for 15-minute walks on my own at night after I’ve fed her and inhaling deep under light autumn rain. Listening to rap full blast in my earphones. Speed walking with abandon. Small interactions with strangers in Caffe Nero that remind me I am the same human, after all. Allowing myself to feel the fire in my belly, to remember I am far from gentle. I am still me.
*
My baby was as late as a baby can be - 10 and half months she stayed in the womb - until I was pressured to be induced. The induction was painful and unsuccessful (which is probably why it was so painful), and ended in an emergency c-section. The experience is an incomplete puzzle in my head that I try to piece together from the moment I had gas and air, to the opioids the midwife injected into the thigh and the fetal scalp electrode they inserted through my cervix that attached to my baby’s head when her heart was distressed. My waters broken with a hook by a midwife, the sepsis, the blood pouring down my legs, the epidural. Bending my spine like a cat curling into a ball for the spinal injection - stay still, the doctors said - and how it felt to no longer feel my legs. I hit them afterwards and my thighs vibrated under my fingers like a rubber tyre.
*
Coming home was a blur of leaking milk and blood clots, my stitches thick and barely scabbed over, dark purple and black stretch marks decorating what was left of my baby bump, shades of grey and blue on my arms from all the blood tests, rusty scabs on my hands from the countless cannulas I had. Blues and blacks and reds and nightmares of waking up in a hospital bed and not being able to move. This tiny thing needs me. An overwhelming feeling that people just don’t get it. My torso stretched and sank into itself, as soft as a bruised peach, just battered pulp and skin. When I got home, I had to inject myself in the thigh every night with blood thinners. Every injection gave me a new bruise the next day, purple and round. Five, six, seven, I counted them. My husband had to inject me after I did the first few; I just couldn’t pierce my own skin after a while. Despite taking blood thinners, I got a blood swelling anyway and ended up back in hospital with another infection.
*
It was 3am when the doctor said they had to take me for an emergency c-section. Baby’s heart rate was distressed. I knew I’d be kept awake for it, but when I saw my husband dressed in hospital scrubs, when I was rushed into theatre, when I saw the bright lights and clinical white walls and at least six other people in the room, it suddenly felt surreal and barbaric. Feeling the fear is psychologically worse than the pain itself.
“Do you consent?” they ask, pen in one hand and form in another for you to sign.
Risks are bladder damage, bowel damage, a need for a hysterectomy, hemorrhaging.
“Do you consent?” they ask, after having made me fast for nearly 24 hours, after being sleep deprived and in excruciating pain for 48 hours, with an epidural still in my back.
“Do you consent?” they ask, as if there is a choice.
They wheel me into the theatre and stop next to the operating table. “Can you roll onto the operating table?” a huge man in scrubs asks me, and he reminded me of a friendly giant. I’m sure if I saw him now, he wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as he is in my mind. I try to roll and I can’t. I’ve been on the epidural so long that my legs are not a part of me anymore. My catheter hangs down between my legs. It all feels very humiliating, this lack of power and control. Okay, no worries. One, two, three, they say as they roll me from the bed to the operating table and inject my spine with more anesthetic; a ‘spinal block’, it’s called. And then screen between me and my abdomen went up.
*
In that experience a bit of my steeliness was taken from me; a hardness that started to be chipped away in pregnancy, revealing a vulnerability that I didn’t like the feel of on my skin. Pink and raw and susceptible to the elements. I thought that hardness would return postpartum but I realise now, it won’t. I can’t be the same. Motherhood has softened me and taken some nihilism away, and I should be grateful for that. But ultimately all change is hard, at first. I have to grieve the person I once was and I realise now, it’s not vain or superficial to accept that I also have to grieve the body I once had.
*
When I went out for the first time - food shopping in Tooting - I left the baby with my mother-in-law for a minute to go to get a Kashmiri chai from a cafe. I was still very fragile, still unable to speed walk at my usual pace and tender all over. I forgot that I miss people watching, the sounds of Somali Arabic and the smell of incense wafting out of shops selling marigold necklaces, Punjabi being yelled from fruit stalls, the sweetness of the Ambala store and the delicious greasy Chinese food at the market. I inhale the sound of a police siren whirring past at full speed like it’s fresh air and marvel at the busyness, at how seamlessly life goes on. For a moment I feel like me until passer-bys get too close, close enough to lightly barge me as they stomp past on their merry way and I want to tell them to back off, I have someone tiny and precious waiting in the car for me. Don’t you know I’m a mother now and my stitches are still tender, I have someone I need to stay strong for, I have someone I have to return to, someone that needs me. The urge to be with her is primal.
*
I feel like I need to keep talking about my birth story so I can process it, and move on from the fear I felt throughout it. But life moves on faster than you can keep up sometimes, so it’s starting to feel like another thing I’ll have to bury half alive and just get over. That’s what it is to be a woman; to bury things half alive, to have a graveyard’s worth of untold tales. I no longer have the luxury of being melancholic, and I kinda miss it. No time for my own emotions now. This story is far from finished but time is ticking, and I have to get back to my baby. She is too sweet, too precious to be kept waiting. I once saw having a child as continuing a legacy, but I see now, that was egotistical. She is a legacy all of her own, far greater than me. Children come through you, not from you. My daughter is so very uniquely her already - alert, sharp, strong, inquisitive, calm. I can’t take credit for any of it.
Anyway, I better go. I’ll be back, eventually; in every sense (I hope).
I'm in awe! Thank you for sharing your story it takes a lot of courage to share the raw details, you are a very brave woman ♥️♥️♥️
Amazing. You’re simply the best. Thanks for sharing ❤️❤️❤️