Super Boob
Exploring the raw ragged early days of motherhood
*Written in the winter of 2020 right before the world shut down*
I’m nearly 9 months in to being a mom and I’m so tired and sometimes hopeless. It feels like I gave up my whole life to be a mom. My identity is shattered and I have one giant boob. The right one. I’ve had beautiful luscious boobs since middle school and now I have lopsided strange boobs that look like they should belong to two different people. One is probably a B cup and the other is a D. We’ve been calling her Super Boob.
I know that I’m supposed to just be happy about my baby’s health and happiness but I also feel exhausted and used up. I haven’t felt like a beautiful woman in a long time and sex is the last thing on my mind. Career is also back behind tracking nap times, changing diapers, speaking gibberish, and trying to take care of my sore back that aches from strange breastfeeding positions, lack of sleep, and bending to pick up a 30 pound baby.
Am I doing something wrong or is this how early motherhood is supposed to feel? I’m isolated and lonely and want to join in on mom’s groups but they all happen in the morning during my baby’s nap time and if I disrupt nap time I don’t get any sleep at night. None. I feel jealous of my childless friends who are buying houses, shopping for wedding dresses, staying up late and partying, growing their careers and doing whatever they want to on a whim. I was so excited to be a mom. I love pregnancy and birth. I’m still hoping to be a midwife. And this is so fucking hard.
I’m not sure anything will make this easier. A village maybe, although we are living with my family and it’s adding a lot of chaos to the mix. Sometimes helpful but often disruptive. We’re in California and I miss small town Missoula, Montana with spacious wildness and sweet community that comes together in the winter as the weather gets tough. It’s too easy here and everyone sticks to themselves and keeps moving fast in the nonexistent seasons.
I wish we’d stayed in Montana. I wish we’d recognized how good our quality of life was and just made it work. With a baby, through the winter, without any family. Maybe I would have been depressed there too. Maybe the first year with a baby is just brutal for everyone no matter what. Social media makes it worse, looking at pictures of smiling new mommies with their adorable clean babes with bows who probably sleep through the night. That’s what we’re meant to think. That it must be easy for them. They must still be having passionate sex with their partners, feeling beautiful and held by community. While I’m up here in this house on a hill with my family where I don’t get any interaction with friends. If we go out or go anywhere we disrupt nap time so the choice is to socialize or get some sleep and it’s really fucking hard.
I look so much older now. With tired eyes, new wrinkles, and gray hairs. I used to be a wild river guide who laughed and yelled and went over waterfalls. Now I’m this inside creature who makes funny faces and constantly checks the clock and rushes around to try to get everything done. And it never gets done. There’s always a mess to clean up, laundry to do, dogs to walk, a butt to wipe.
Now it’s raining and I’m sitting in my childhood room where I never thought I would return. I’ve regressed to an angry teenager who feels trapped in this too clean too fancy town where everyone is too rich and striving anyway. I have to get out of here. But the choice is to leave family support or live the life I want. The slow small town, spacious wild dirt bag life that makes me happy. Why did we think this was worth it to disrupt everything and leave our budding community? I had mama friends there. I had a meditation group and a dance community. Now I have a baby who is amazing and sucks the life out of me. I have my parents who are smothering or absent and my husband who seems happy with his great job that he gets to disappear to every day. So where does that leave me?
A hot mess drowning in laundry and dirty diapers. I don’t want to be this kind of mom. Miserable and isolated. Feeling dried up and old. All my energy going to this vibrant little being who shines like the fucking Buddha. Why can’t I be happy for him? What do I need to do to make life feel worth it again? All my time goes toward baby care and then work and I have no time to just do what I want to do. Except for now of course, nap time, when I sit down and gripe about all the things making me miserable. All the things I don’t want to say out loud, don’t want to tell anyone because everyone wants to see me as this happy glowing mommy who only needs the satisfaction of my fat little Buddha child. But I also want to feel like I’m contributing to society, growing and learning and not just stuck in the house. But I don’t want to disappear into a 40-hour-a-week job and miss out on these baby moments either. I’ve been working 15 hours a week and I’m fucking exhausted. When will I sleep again? When will I laugh again? When will I be happy?
*Super Boob was written in the winter of 2020 when I was 9 months in to motherhood with our first baby and now I am nearly 9 months pregnant with our second. Reading this made me laugh out loud and also brought up the visceral memory of those early days of motherhood when everything feels raw and ragged. I thought life was so hard and I had no idea that the world was about to shut down from a global pandemic and mom-life was about to get so much harder. I’m sharing this as a time capsule and to shine a light on the common experience of postpartum motherhood, which I think of as the first year (at least!) with a baby. Our culture tends to focus a lot of attention on the beauty of pregnancy and the fear and pain of birth. So often the real long term challenges of postpartum get forgotten or left out of the story. It’s so common for new mothers in our society to feel isolated and undervalued for the enormous work that we do.
As a Doula, midwifery student, and massage therapist I’ve worked with many postpartum moms. When I was becoming a mom myself I was naive enough to think that because of my knowledge and expertise it would be easier for me. I had read all the books, held moms while they cried about loneliness, breastfeeding issues, and lack of sleep. I thought motherhood would not bring me down. I would be a cool, fun, happy mom! It took me about 3 years to get back on my feet, to feel strong again in my body and mind, and have a sense of freedom as an individual, not just a mother. And now we are going back. Back to the underworld, the sleepless nights, constant snuggles and blurriness of the early baby days, months, years...
I wrote Super Boob in a moment of desperation and now it feels like a pretty accurate description of what a lot of new moms go through, often with very little support. If you’re currently in your postpartum experience I hope reading this makes you laugh and feel less alone. Having a new baby is a huge challenge, an enormous rite of passage, and there is no one who gets out unscathed or unchanged, no matter how cute the photos are that we post on social media. If you have no experience of taking care of a new baby I hope this gives you an idea of what it is sometimes like and makes you want to call a friend or your sister who’s in the thick of it. Just make them laugh or tell them that you love and value them and see the hard work they’re doing. Please don’t tell them to enjoy every moment! You can tell them that it will eventually get easier and that you know it is really hard right now and eventually it will feel worth it. Bring them food, coffee, a treat, or a hug! Rub their feet and hold them while they cry. Laughter, food, and tears were the biggest salves to my postpartum wounds.
Having a baby is a really big deal, way bigger than our culture seems to believe. It changes everything and the actual birth experience is a tiny blip in the reality of a new mother, a new family, but gets so much attention. I hope this shines a light on the postpartum period, which in my mind is way longer than 6 weeks. The first year, at least, with a new baby is a mind blowing experience.
What if we prepared for birth like it was the biggest rite of passage of our lives? What if we gave birth and the experience of becoming parents the weight it deserves, like walking through a fire and the old identity burning, emerging new, like a phoenix flying? What if we prepared as if we were about to enter this long term marathon that is meant to consume us and rub us raw until we form our super powers and shine like diamonds? How would you prepare for that? Call in community, ask for help, develop vulnerability, create a badass team, cry, laugh, strengthen and relax your body and mind, meditate everyday, dance, explore the intricate sensations of the body, develop resilience. What if we valued birth as much as we value weddings and we saved money for the experience we want to have and took months, years preparing and dreaming about this huge life changing adventure that will likely be way bigger than getting married?
Giving ourselves time to heal and discover our new identities as parents is crucially important and valuing this tender magical postpartum time as a culture could change the world. Let’s not leave new parents alone to tend to every need of tiny babies. Valuing birth is valuing life. Each birth, each new life, affects everyone and if we learned to care for one another, and awaken to the power of this liminal time between worlds we could create a more beautiful reality for everyone. We’re in this together.