She arrived early, our baby. When we brought her home the nursery was so unfinished and full of irrelevant things it seemed like the site of a small explosion. After putting her into her crib for the first time, Beng and I curled up in bed holding hands, asking each other faintly, ‘What have we done? What have we done?”
The act of giving birth is close to dying. Of the experience I wrote: “I was going to shatter. I felt like the world was ending. I was going to explode into a million pieces. My life, my body— they were combusting. I was wild, an animal. I wasn’t human. I was something primal, something that I perhaps had been, a long time ago, when I had been born. All that building pressure. I was a dying star about to explode.”
Somehow, this unremarkable body of mine became a universe unto which another living, sentient being had been created and pushed out. The heady adrenaline of birthing a whole person shape-shifted into loathsome proportions, and was sometimes subject to misinterpretation. “And how are we feeling today?” asked the doctor at my post-natal checkup. “I’m giddy,” I said, the floor tilting up toward the wall in some sustained panic attack. “How wonderful!” she exclaimed, thinking I was giddy with happiness.
I couldn’t believe there was a stranger now attached to my boob, my hip. Resentment flared. All I wanted to do was sleep forever, but this undersized tyrant kept laying claim to my body, again and again. I didn’t understand why I had to offer my breast to this rude interloper, nor what claim she had on me. I was the discontented giver of manna to a tiny pink thing that needed and wanted so much. The postpartum depression diagnosis was unsurprising, an annoyance. Oh, I grit my teeth. Of course.
Postpartum depression is being a new mother while having the most unmothering thoughts. It is depression but now with a squalling baby as the galling fulcrum upon which all the familiar terrible emotions get tapered onto. I felt nothing when Beng stared at her calf-eyed in her hospital crib. I was vexed and indifferent when she wailed. The baby had a name but still felt like a stranger so I referred to her as “the baby.” Pronouns had to be wrangled. As a fetus she was an “it,” so “she” now felt strange on my tongue. I asked Beng, “How does a connection with the baby feel like?” because I honestly didn’t know.
I didn’t choose my child, and she didn’t choose me. We just turned up in each others lives one day, and had no choice but to stay. This fact about families had always been ambient knowledge, but it suddenly hit me with insights that seemed urgent— I didn’t choose my parents, and they didn’t choose me. Isn’t it strange how our most intimate relationships are the ones we don’t have any say in? We choose our friends, mentors, and lovers. We can also un-choose them. But our parents and children are impositions we learn to live with for the rest of our lives: the necessary imperialism of family.
—but what do I do with this pointless insight? In Samantha Hunt’s short story “A Love Story,” she writes, “This family is the biggest experiment I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?”
Nursing an infant created an ocean of lost time. The span of a day was empty of landmarks and signposts; a vast field of unmeasured hours. I remember nothing of her daytime feeds except watching Train to Busan, a zombie apocalypse movie that seemed apt for some unanalyzed reason. I remember nothing of her nighttime feeds except stumbling around in the dark groping towards the nursery. Time lacked its usual architecture, was measured in spit-ups and soiled nappies, animated by the crackle of the white-noise machine that soothed the baby to sleep. Every day I waited with increasing resentment for Beng to return home. Each minute past 6.30pm that unfolded without the front door opening was an offense of the highest order. He invariably returned, smelling of the outdoors and A Life, and I would open my mouth for the first time of the day to snarl, “Your turn,” briefly forgetting that he is an outstanding man and father. Instead, I retreated like a wounded animal to untangle my self-portrait from the hours spent without speech or thought, resisting the thought that I had “achieved absolutely nothing today”.
Feed, change, rock. Burp, swaddle, bathe. Life became an endless catalogue of repetition, its purpose narrowed down to the mammalian function of my breasts and clutching hands— was there a time when language was so utterly besides the point? Speech became a series of non-sequiters in a Beckettian milieu. A quiet dinner with Beng while the baby was asleep, then, a startled cry, apropos nothing— “The milk bottle!”
New motherhood was first scripted in the body — mine, and my baby’s— and only then occasionally tapped out on a keyboard. My journal entries from those days were rare and fragmented; short, intense bursts of thought about this new maternal life that I had perhaps hoped to decipher in the future but that still remain unprocessed, such as, “Ecological promotion, egological demotion.” Contextless flashbulbs of introspection before the next cry inevitably shattered the quiet of the apartment and life wasn’t mine once again— “D.W. Winnicott’s ‘ordinary devotion.’ I am a world.” Small thoughts, cogitation in miniature.
Even as my days were plotless and uneventful, the velocity of life imposed its urgency, its next need, its next demand. The autocratic imperative towards momentum— “hold me now, change me now, put me to sleep now, now, now”— was dictated by the most helpless of victims. The pitiless speed of life at its most demanding whisked me away. The asynchronous hours were a never-ending tedium, as well as a speeding train at risk of crashing. Arms so busy, mind so empty.
Depression and new motherhood emptied my life of subjective experience. I became a landscape onto which the baby derived her warmth and sustenance, the backdrop to her developing storyline. What did she care for my thoughts and personality? What did she know of my obliterated sense of self? My career was in conformity and routine, my graduate education in wiping excrement from a bottom, day after day. The poet Rachel Zucker writes of new motherhood, “I’ve been promoted master of homeostasis: maintain, sustain, pattern.”
I ached for older women. My mother was dead. Her sister, dead. My remaining aunt and grandmother were on the other side of the world. I took comfort from textual mothers, literary mothers— women I met illuminated by the glow of my Kindle. Women wrangling between the labors of their minds, and the buildings of their bodies. I felt relief as the fictional female protagonist of Rivka Galchan’s Little Labors continued to “not write her dissertation” because she was taking care of and distracted by her one-year-old son. I read with horror Maggie Nelson’s account in The Argonauts of how a distinguished female professor at a conference publicly tore down another eminent professor’s self-photography on the banality and beauty of her postpartum body. It was “too personal”, the former said, “too much”.
Snow fell, and the days were a fugue of automation. I breastfed fourteen hours a day, and slept two hours a night. Soiled sheets were changed, and toys picked up. I faithfully ingested my medication—the highest dosage possible, with ‘XL’ on the box— and cleaned vomit off my shirt. I held the baby up on FaceTime for people to coo over, and waited for Beng to come home. Panic attacks came and departed, and the leaden patina of depression was a steadfast friend. I lived in my pajamas and hardly left the house. Every day was so much of the same.
Yet in the endless bend of hours, there slowly unfolded the hesitant incredulity that anything could happen, anything at all. We stopped calling the baby “the baby”. Quinn— that’s her name, a monosyllabic magic spell that turned her head and lit up her eyes. Her tiny feet unfurled like the fronds of ferns. Her neck muscles got stronger and she pushed herself up. Trying to feed her ‘solids’ ( a questionable cocktail of breast milk and apple puree) was a nerve-wracking, high-stakes experiment. Flipping herself over? A crowd-pleasing Olympian feat. The day she first cracked a smile at me, it was like a thundercloud shattered into mist. She sees me, I marvelled. And I began seeing her too.
This tiny stranger with her unblinking eyes and little mouth had become, with time, some part of my beautiful, desolate sky. I struggled still with the dissociation, the indifference and antipathy. But the way her hair smelled. The way those little fingers clutched my chest. Gradually, the two hours of sleep a night became three, then four. Could life together be easier? Joyful, even?
Time’s placid melt, that long struggle day after painful day, altered other things too.
One ordinary day many months later I woke up, and felt some part in my head break. Something cracked, almost audibly. A heaviness that had gotten darker and more oppressive since I was a teenager, that had kept me hidebound and tethered to bed for days that stretched into months, then years— fractured, and some achingly familiar part of myself leaked out. Clad in pajamas, I padded out of the bedroom, looking at the panels of sunlight snaking their way across the living room floor with the startled eyes of a newborn.
It had been, I remember, an ordinary day.
“I think the meds worked,” I announced skeptically over breakfast. Beng went off to work and I sat down the whole day, perturbed, with an unbothered Quinn at my breast. “Am I myself again?” I later journalled dubiously. The lens by which I saw the world was different, but I couldn’t describe how. The apartment hummed its usual quiet, and the pipes continued to creak. The only things I knew for certain were that I had been in my stupid pink pajamas and everything seemed tremblingly new.
Could life really be this precious, this bright? No. Life would be as it always was. There was no spontaneous act of recovery, no coherent restitution arc. Still whole days feeling nothing, empty and depleted. Yet slowly, I watched myself like an incredulous voyeur as motley things came into sharper focus, with a softer gaze. The purple of onions, toes under the duvet, the crisp chill of winter air. I lay next to my growing child and saw her slowly pass from sleep to wakefulness— how she suddenly rolled onto her stomach and raised herself, blinking ferociously into the light.
It was odd, the hesitant raw edge of things changing. The world seemed to have opened itself up to me again. Or maybe I was the one who had opened back out into the world. Blades of grass. The trees. The clouds. How this gurgling child tried her gosh darnest to aim a spoon into her mouth. I watched myself watch the world, saw myself slowly become re-enchanted with its small beauties. I named them to my daughter, knowing I also named them for myself. Look, Quinn. Look at the birds. Look at the snow melt. The sun is shining today. Look.
I observed, dumbstruck, as my sluggish appetite for this fragile, revived existence started beating its weakened pulse. Little moments started shining through the default obfuscation, the numb hopelessness. How baffling that so much unfettered glee could come from me kissing a bath toy! She sat naked in the tub, this tiny human, holding out a toy, thrusting it in my face as I pursed my lips, ready for a kiss. Contact and muack!— the world dissolved into star-blinding hilarity—shockingly high-pitched, almost embarrassingly loud— two little teeth posturing through an ocean of delight. I watched my own nostalgia for the world, surprised to find some of its truths in Quinn’s babbling.
Day after day, we heaved the infant carseat around, and struggled to unfold the baby stroller. We washed stained bibs and emptied the diaper bin. We cycled through parenthood’s repetitive obligations and misadventures, our domestic dramas and makeshift solutions. Depression inevitably lurched and departed, only to return again. And yet. And yet. I fell deeper in love with the version of my husband who laughed his rare laughs at some small thing our child did. I looked at my milk-drunk baby and felt inexplicably, atrociously proud. Of what, I couldn’t say. Her existence? The sheer fact of her?
Instants dripping, sodden with meaning— though what they mean, no one knows. Amidst the tedium and darkness, moments like these happen whether I want them to or not— where life bursts open and I look around and realize everything I need is right here, in front of my eyes. I feel the miracle of being able to see the world this way, and always want to cry.
The hours with Quinn continue to pass, its rolling centimeters of mundane sacredness making up the mile of our finite time together, and I know I am in the midst of the accumulated gorgeousness of life. The soaring hope of ordinary days.
Dearest Quinn,
it occurred to me that this whole book, all these letters to you, is a letter to the future from the past. Trying to preserve the present, telling you my hopes, apologizing for things I cannot undo. By writing to a future ‘you’ am I not writing to some abstract spirit, some maybe-apparition?
The relationship between a parent and child is always fraught. I am thinking of the challenges I have communicating with my father, and his own difficulties reaching his mother. We are all speaking different languages, and it is difficult to sympathize or understand each other. I wonder what you’ll find difficult about me, the things you’ll want to break away from. I don’t know where I’m going with this.
All this to say— I love you. My starlight child, who arrived— by surprise— on Thanksgiving night. The patter of your feet across the parquet floors on the second floor of Limau Purut are the lullabies of my nights. Your little head on my lap is the joy of my mornings. And your wide eyes and open mouth as I tell you stories in the dark are some of the reasons for my existence. I love you, my capricious pixie, fairy queen, animal spirit.
Love,
Mum