Fears: Two Weeks Postpartum

A poem of sorts

Author’s Note: When my first son was two weeks old, I found myself utterly overwhelmed by the weight of new motherhood. I couldn’t seem to stop crying, and my mind wouldn’t stop swirling with a hundred uninvited thoughts. Finally, nursing my son, I took out my notebook and began to write a list of fears. And though the fears did not go away, the writing eased something in me, as though voicing them to the page alone made them less powerful. With the birth of my second and third sons, I felt again a kind of earth-shattering sense of loss, even amid the joy of new life. People will say it is hormones, but I also think there is something intrinsically reshaping in the birth of every child. The world is making space for a brand new soul, and that space must first be carved out of a mother’s heart. So with the birth of each child, I returned to this list, not only to show myself that many of the fears never came to fruition but also to let myself feel my fears in all their reality. I’ve revised some of the wording since that first draft six years ago, but the feelings they express are the same raw emotions of those first two weeks.

Fears: Two Weeks Postpartum

That your body, barely unfurled from the warmth of mine, will forget the rules on this side, and I will wake from sleep too short to find a body blue, tiny chest entombing the heart I gave so much to make.

That you, baffled and outraged by the cruelty of hunger, haven’t learned to latch correctly, and now you will never nurse the way you should.

That this failure in feeding will lead somehow to pickiness that turns to tantrums. That if I can’t get it right now, I won’t ever get it right.