“I hate to tell you this girl, but, we’re made for this shit.” That’s what my sister-in-law told me.
Three months post baby, I was feeling depleted: physically, emotionally, spiritually. I felt like a warm moving corpse with only space between by ears and very sore nipples. I couldn’t even escape to Netflix without feeling handicapped because I couldn’t follow any plot unless I was both hearing english and reading english via the closed captions. Even then, I still had to re-watch all the time.
Hearing that “we’re made for this” was both affirming and totally devastating. It’s a complicated feeling when you feel both inept as a human in the world and also like a ruthless maternal machine capable of doing anything it takes-- for as long as it takes-- to keep her baby sleeping.
I had to bounce- for hours on my yoga ball. It was my baby’s cure-all and my nemesis: our drug. I guess I was made for it because I just kept bouncing. All morning. All afternoon. All evening, bounce bounce bounce. My husband couldn’t bounce for longer than a few minutes, he said...because it wasn’t comfortable for his back, he told me. It wasn’t until then that I realized he hadn’t automatically sacrificed his own comfort the moment she was born like I had. Huh.