On Guilt and Fear
When I brought you back home from the hospital, the excitement of determining my own parenting style flowed through my veins. Enthusiasm about shaping my environment and my interactions with you according to my values, something there was no room to do while still in the hospital. I took a deep dive into parenting books. And slowly, I turned away from each one with disgust. The brand of motherhood I was so sure I would connect with, shamed me. Over and over again, I read how those first hours and days were crucial. The importance of skin to skin, breastfeeding, and connecting immediately following the birth. As if our separation had been a choice. How unfair to have those painful first days repeatedly poked at.
Every book I read made me feel lousier and eventually I stopped reading them altogether.
There were so many sweet moments turned sour because of fear. (Now they’ve turned sweet again in hindsight!) Just weeks old, my baby started hooting like a gorilla. What a hilarious sound to come out of a tiny bassinet. I imagined that, had ape-hooting been our language, this would have been her building blocks. It only took minutes until Eyal suggested, maybe it wasn’t so cute. Maybe there was something wrong. And so quickly, my confidence unravelled. It lay in a pile at my feet until our sweet midwives made a special house visit to calm our fears and piece us back together. She gave a belly chuckle and said, geeze, babies make all kinds of weird sounds. And everything become golden again.
That kept happening. How quickly a little unreasonable fear would consume me. In google searches, I learned to type in the information I hoped to find. “Baby makes gorilla sounds and that is totally normal.”
When my baby was already around 7 months, I found a book about postpartum anxiety put out on a neighbour’s curb. Sometimes the only part you really need to read is the intro. I looked back at those first months. Months when I couldn’t be around anyone without crying, when my parents came with home-cooked meals and I told them to stay while I went to the kitchen to cry alone. Those first months where I spent my nights awake in bed torn between co-sleeping bliss and imagining totally improbable, creative, disgusting things befalling my child.
To learn that so many others have felt this way, what a game-changer. Though I still think it’s too simple to say it was all anxiety. Those hard moments were connected to an openness I felt after giving birth. I felt everything around me more deeply. Violent scenes on tv wounded me and stories on the news left me battered. The only experience I had feeling this way was in the days before a period. On those days I feel more sensitive, or as I like to think of it now, more open. At a year and a half, I still get those thoughts but they’re quieter now, my openness more of a closedness.
—Mika G.