The morning I brought her home, I stood in the kitchen at 4 a.m. holding a glass of water and thinking, very clearly, I don't know how to do this. Not in a poetic way. In a flat, factual way. Like admitting you've never driven stick.
Everyone had told me it would be hard. Nobody had told me it would be unfamiliar. Those are different words. Hard means you push through. Unfamiliar means you don't know which direction push is.
This is a list of the things nobody told me. I'm writing it down because I keep meeting women who think they're the only ones.
The first week is not about the baby.
It's about your body trying to figure out what just happened. You will cry on day four for no reason. This is called the milk coming in and it's also called being human. Don't google it at 2 a.m. Call someone who had a baby recently. Not your mother — someone who remembers.
"I kept waiting to feel like her mother. It took me six weeks. Nobody tells you that either."
Photos are not feelings.
The first photo I have of myself with her is a blurry, bad-light iPhone shot from the hospital bed. The second photo is from three weeks later, when someone came over and said "let me take one of you." In the second one I look wrecked and I love it. Take the second photo. Take it early. Don't wait until you feel ready — you won't.
You will be lonely in a way you did not know existed.
Not the lonely of being alone. The other one — the lonely of being needed constantly by a person who can't speak. It lifts. But not on its own. You have to name it out loud to another person, preferably one who is also awake at odd hours for the same reason.
This is what the village is for. It was always what it was for. We forgot, somewhere along the way.
Small things I wish I'd had:
- A very large water bottle, the kind with a straw.
- Three pairs of pants that fit the body I had at that moment, not the one I was waiting to get back.
- One good podcast to listen to during night feeds. Not an improving one. A funny one.
- A friend who wasn't a mother, who would text me about things that had nothing to do with the baby.
- Permission to order the dinner.
What I would tell her now.
I would tell her that the woman in the kitchen at 4 a.m. isn't lost — she's new. That's the part the books get wrong. They make it sound like motherhood is something you recover into, like a sport injury. It isn't. It's something you become. Becoming is slow and it is also beautiful and nobody's Instagram caption will ever do it justice.
So this isn't advice. It's just a note, from one kitchen to another, written at a less terrible hour.
— ✦ —
