Undulating

Celebrating new life and confronting death in the postpartum period.

I’m standing with my back to the shower stream when I notice a small pink jewel on the white tile of my shower floor. I’ve seen it kicking around the house the last few weeks, migrating from my daughter’s playroom to the kitchen, and now, to the bathroom, where it’s gyrating on a sea of suds at my feet. A soapy rinse runs over the hill of my shoulders down the slope of my deflated stomach past the freshly reopened incision. The jewel bobs at the edge of my toes.

I take a moment to admire the sun pouring into the bathroom, illuminating the white tiled walls and their glossy finish. In this rare moment of quiet, only the sound of water pounding the tile and the dull thud at the back of my head, I’m awash with relief.

Nearly 10 months ago, sitting in this same bathroom next to a positive pregnancy test, I was certain moments like these would be nonexistent. I cried with my head in my palms on the very toilet I now use to assist in putting on my stretchy mesh postpartum underwear. But in this moment, six days after having my second child, all I felt was a warm flush of contentment. Everything was OK. There was sunshine; I had time to wash my hair; my sleepy newborn was peacefully dozing in our bedroom; our toddler had actually agreed to stay in her room for “nap” time; my husband made me chicken-ginger congee and restorative tea infusions; my mother was here, dutifully reporting each morning as grandma in residence. On Day 6 of my postpartum journey, I was blissful.

*

I promise not to make this newsletter a pregnancy and postpartum destination, but I can’t tell you about Day 6 of my postpartum period without telling you about Day 9, which is the day I found my mother collapsed on the floor of our guest bedroom, which doubles as my son’s nursery.

Bear with me, because I want to censor my words here. I don’t know how much I want to share because I don’t yet know if this moment will be the pivotal moment of my mother’s life, which is to say, the beginning of her death. Which is to say, maybe that moment in the guest room is one I want only for me, which will not only spare you from its haunting nature, but will also keep this awful memory close to my heart, because maybe that day was the last day my mother and I were alive in the same space, just the two of us. I don’t know yet.

I can’t tell you about my postpartum experience without telling you that I found her, that my husband called 911, that I counted aloud with the 911 operator on speakerphone. She directed me in counts of four, on and on into what felt like forever.

“What’s your name?” the 911 operator asked while I counted.
”Deenieee,” I struggled to say through sobs, as if the “e’s” were too much effort to muster.
”Keep counting, Deenie, you’re doing a great job. This is helping, I promise.”

I heard my sobs in all their hysterics as if I were outside of myself, and though I couldn’t temper their volume, I still worried my three-year-old, asleep in the room next to us, would certainly hear me. I worried that she was lying there, clutching her sheets, afraid of the sounds her mother was making. Thankfully my nine-day-old baby was downstairs, asleep in the company of my mother in law. Thankfully, the adrenaline meant I did not think about how, just over a week prior, my OB/GYN had cut through seven layers of my abdomen to pull my baby from my body. Unfortunately, I don’t know that my chest compressions did anything to save her.

Then there were sirens. The fire department arrived, then EMS, when they said things like, “Is she tachy?” and shocked her heart with two paddles.

My mother has been in ICU for over two weeks now. We play her Motown—The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Temptations—because this is the music that makes her heart sing and her body move, which is all we want from her. I’ve been reading her books from her Kindle; she loves psychological thrillers.

“I’ve read so many, I could practically write one myself,” she told me once. But I don’t think mom cares what I read, so I think I’m thinking of finding something we’ll both enjoy: A Celeste Ng book or maybe I’ll revisit one of my favorite David Sedaris collections. I’m going to see if she packed her perfume, Estée Lauder Pleasures, and I’m going to get a vial of Chanel No. 5, which is the fragrance her mother, my grandmother Ruby, wore. Anything familiar. Anything to stir her.

Everyone tells me they are praying for us, but I can’t help feeling like God’s playing a cruel joke. Mom would hate that, that I feel that way. But mom would hate everything about this. She would hate the way we hover by her bedside, asking her for a response. She would hate her lack of function, the loss of dignity, her inability to speak, the wires and tubes and injections and incessant beeping, the neglect of her hair.

I know someone will tell me that it’s “all in God’s plan,” but I’d like to know what sort of fucked-up plan that is. Telling someone its in God’s plan to find their despondent mother on the floor of the guest room and subsequently watch them be trapped inside their own body is like saying war or genocide or terrorism or gun violence or babies dying from cancer is all part of God’s plan. There is no silver lining. It just feels like torture to me.

*

I love change. It’s one of my favorite things about new motherhood: a chance to begin again with a new life—and not just for the baby. Even though, on the morning of my son’s birth, I cried as we pulled into the parking lot of the Women’s Center. 

“Is it weird that I feel sad?” I asked my husband. “It’s just been us three for so long. I wasn’t unhappy, just us three.”

“No, it’s not weird,” he said, always the listener, the champion.

“I know they say it feels impossible to love another child as much as you love the first, but you do. I know that must be true, but…”

We walked through the hospital parking lot and I waddled slowly for the last time. I reached for his hand and he squeezed back. He knew I was scared: of having my body cut open again, of recovering from surgery with a newborn and a toddler, of what happened last time, of sleepless nights, of lost writing time and nonexistent money for new obligations. Just before we walked through the sliding doors of the Women’s Center together, he stopped and turned to me.

“Hey,” he said, opening his arms for a signature hug. “We’ve got this. Let’s go have a baby.” And he wrapped me in his arms and I was reminded of why I wanted to have babies with him in the first place. 

Now my baby boy is three and a half weeks old and I see, each day, a chance to begin again. A new life, a fresh start, into which I will pour myself. My babies continue to demand I get out of bed every morning, even when I am too exhausted to speak and too grief-stricken to smile. The infant eats every three hours. My three year old doesn’t—and shouldn’t—understand my pain. When she cracks open my door at 6:15 a.m. and climbs onto my bed, I don’t remind her that she is supposed to stay in her room until we fetch her at 7 a.m. There’s been enough change already; she asks me every day what’s wrong with Sitti, what happened to her heart?

Instead I curl her into me and kiss her head. “How did you sleep? I’m so happy to see you,” I tell her. No one will ever love me the way my mother has. Loving my babies the way she loves me is the least I can do.

*

I’m thinking about our bodies as vessels. The night before my son was born, how I wanted my husband to hold me, to put me back in my body one last time before it belonged to an infant for an indeterminate amount of time.

I’m thinking about the mantra I whispered to myself as they numbed my lower body for the C-section, “I am light, I am calm, I am a passageway.” In a matter of moments, a new life was going to join us here on earth, a soul that chose me as its mother.

In Micheal Newton’s Journey of Souls, he describes the way the soul leaves the body at the moment of physical death. In incidents of trauma, the soul will often linger at the scene, afraid to pass to the next plane until they know their loved ones are OK. For lack of a better explanation, the soul just can’t let go.

I’m looking at my mother’s body in the hospital bed and I’m wondering where her soul is. She is technically breathing, though often with the assistance of a machine. But I want to know where her spirit lives. Here in this room with us? Does it follow me home at night? Or does it lie inside her, urging her to open her eyes. Does it hear us asking for her to come back and join us?

“Can you look at me, Mom? Can you look over here?” we ask her, we want her to follow our voices, but she’s not tracking. Her eyes gaze straight ahead and I wonder what she’s looking for.

I’m thinking about the violence of birth and death. The pressure, the tugging, the detaching and the way my son’s body was ripped from mine. The blood and flesh and fluid. I’m thinking about the way I hoisted my mother’s torso from the floor when I found her, the way I pressed my ear to her mouth to listen for breath that did not come, the unresponsive look on her face when I found her without a pulse. The abruptness, the violent horror that gripped my heart and squeezed.

I’m thinking about the ferociousness of my mother. The way she beat cancer and survived 49 years of marriage, and braved her own parents’ long, arduous battles with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Mostly, though, I think of the voracity with which she loved.

I’m thinking about that pink jewel, the way it survived its journey to my shower. The ebbing and flowing on the white tile floor. As of this morning, the jewel was gone. I don’t know where to.

Our favorite ICU nurse, Jamie, told us “healing isn’t like this,” and tilted her hand into an upward gesture, the same way my husband and I mimic airplanes taking off into the sky for our toddler. She said, “It’s like this,” and moved her hand like waves on the ocean, the way we wind surf with our hand from the passenger seat of a moving car. I don’t know how much money Jamie makes, but I can tell you it’s not enough. Teachers and nurses, they never make enough to justify all the hope they give us.

“The brain is the muscle that takes longest to heal,” is what everyone says. I asked my OB/GYN if my C-section incision was still supposed to be this tender. My daughter points out each one of her “boo boos” and demands a new band-aid each night. We teach her that, eventually, our injuries heal. We ask the doctors and the nurses to walk us through each of mom’s incidents, every spike in heart rate, every dip in blood pressure, every medication, how these things are related. We’re compiling pieces to a puzzle we may never finish. Healing isn’t linear. Maybe healing never comes.