It’s a humbling day when the book you’re reading about baby behavior better describes your own. I’ve now had the experience enough times in the past 10 months to recognize the hard truth behind the cliches: When you’re getting to know your baby, you end up encountering yourself in ways you hadn’t counted on, ways that can be brutally jarring, both for the unexpected content of what can now not be unseen, and for the stakes of the seeing.
Short Form
The First Mudras
A mudra is an intentional
positioning of the body into a shape or pose that expresses specific, sacred
meaning. Most commonly they are identified with special ways of arranging and
holding the hands and fingers within yoga practice and meditation. You might
have seen someone sitting cross-legged, with thumb curled to index finger,
while the other three fingers remained unfurled, resting on the leg, palm up.
Cul-de-sac Feminists
Beyond the 5 Senses: Babies and the Soul Sense
When I had my daughter I knew
nothing about babies. The pregnancy has been a shock, arriving long after I’d
relinquished procreation and moved on. I remained in delighted shock through
the entire pregnancy. Even in the last stretch, as I went to the hospital, as I
stood rocking for 20-some hours with my husband using a wire gizmo to scratch
my head, as I tried everything my midwife suggested and then savored the
epidural trance state of rapt focus as I pushed in a monumental full moon dance
with my baby to bring her out—even then I still couldn’t quite believe I was
pregnant.
Enema, Biopsy, Colonoscopy: My Trifecta of Postpartum Self-Care
Any standard article on the web
about the postpartum period will include these two gems in its bullet point
list: Don’t Skimp On Self-Care + Go On a Date with Your Husband/Spouse/Partner.
7 months in, I can attest that as simple as these well-intentioned suggestions
may be, the likelihood of them happening in any robust way is pretty slim,
unless a not-insignificant web of factors aligns.
Two Thumbs in the Dark
When I opened my Instagram account I named it to go with a book of essays I was starting to write. Several years later, as I’m finishing that collection, the name has come to mean more than I could have guessed at the time. My life has changed enormously; in real ways I am not the same person. I remain a writer. I am still committed to life over death.