“We’re not perfect. I’d like to think we were all perfect, naked as we came, as we entered a brand new world. Things started getting progressively worse from there. Soon, we realized, to be perfect, in our eyes before anybody else’s, we’ll have to work. We’ll have to put up a fight within the confines of an ageing body.”
The bell rang loudly as if reverberating from the shallow depths of my own consciousness. I am not friendly to waker-uppers of any kind, especially the literal ones. Groggily, I crawl out of bed ready with my outbursts of disapproval at the a-hole who’s had the nerve to call on me at such an ungodly hour. Crap! Need to check on the baby first. He’s showing all the expected signs of waking up, rubbing the back of his head vigorously against the pillow in scritch-scratchy swishes. The bell rings again. Urggh! This one is getting my special wrath from hell. I limp, holding my waist to one side nursing a lower back-ache that, I imagine, can only come from a 12-hour shift of gruelling work at a construction site. I don’t get it. What have I done except fall into an interrupted slumber and feed my baby for a half-hour before that?
Raging towards the door in a comical swagger, I unbolt it quickly only to see a shiny, happy face beaming at me. One who probably does afternoon yoga followed by freshly-brewed matcha smoothie. (I know this cos not long before, I used to be one of them.)
Her smile fades when she takes stock of my possibly disheveled, neurotic state.
“Umm…sorry, were you sleeping?”
[Now isn’t that an intimate question? Whether I was sleeping or in the middle of something hot and steamy, which seems a bridge too far at the moment, how is it any of your business? The point is your timing couldn’t be worse.]
“Uh-huh. What is it?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were sleeping. But it’s six o’clock. I thought….
[Say whattt? Yet again, I’ve snoozed all over my plans of starting an exercise regime. Or taking the baby to the park. Basic things that are nowhere close to the supermommy elevation. I know what you’re thinking. What kind of a mom of two sleeps till six pm? Don’t you have kids to feed, errands to run, emergencies to address?]
Speaking of emergencies, one presents itself. The baby can now be heard loud and clear from across three rooms, traumatized, in unmistakable agony.
“If you don’t mind, please come later.” I grit my teeth, slam the door on her face and rush inside without giving much thought to social etiquette — who cares what the queen would say — and the repercussions of anti-social behavior in our close-knit neighborhood.
This has been my wired emotional state for the last couple of weeks. The permanent state of exhaustion and guilt trips that can only come from feeling caged inside a fragile body recuperating from giving birth to another. “We’re both jet-lagged at the moment,” I’d joke to my other mommy friends who wished to pay a visit with biryani, gifts and cheers. Everybody around me is tending and nurturing me as if I’ve just been born. While all I do is look after my baby and train myself to be at his every beck and call. Sometimes, an eerie white noise passes by drowning his loud wails and urgent cries. Sometimes, I forget about the existence of my other daughter, who’s much too sweet and understanding to mind.
My postpartum mind and body seem as though they have been through several ages, through several hells, with stories to recount of war, blood and toil.
But they tell me I’ve had it easy. I had a natural vaginal birth with no medical intervention except for the anesthesia at the end for stitches — I had tears at three places including my cervix. Scientifically speaking, my body will be bouncing back faster than a woman who’s had a C-section or any complications during birthing.
Yet the memory of pain hasn’t quite faded yet. The endorphins didn’t play their part this time. My body reminds me of the work it has put up constantly. My breathing is heavy and erratic. My spine aches in a way that it never has before. My face could audition for an extra in the Twilight series going with the pallor of my skin and contrasting under-eye dark pools. My hair, framing my face flatteringly (I’m told) is beginning to boast of some serious greys, although I don’t feel any wiser. In a nutshell, I despise everything about my mirror reflection — hunched, tired and sad.
Moving from spring to autumn, in a contradictory direction from the external environment, my body and mind are a drastically different landscape from what they were just ten months ago.
It was my birthday. I was wearing a bodycon, off-shoulder black lace dress, completely in my element, happy to be back in a fit and healthy body. The asthma that I had inherited from my mom hadn’t surfaced in the longest time thanks to a dedicated yoga schedule. My spine was erect, alert and agile, just the way it should be. In the days to follow, after we stumbled upon the two pink lines, I’d be ecstatic and ready, prepping my mid-thirties body for the toil it was to go through, sticking to a safe exercise regime and eating healthy, preaching ‘how to maintain a healthy body weight and brace your body for labor’ on Instagram.
And here I was, back in the body image battlefield, wearing an alien body that can no longer hold a side plank. A body that is striving to carry a baby in its arms for more than ten minutes without a reactive spiralling pain in the lower spine and a numbing tinge in its legs.
“My baby boy’s got me weak in the knees”, a reflection that I instantly regret cos it’s disturbing at so many levels thanks to my Shakespearean literature background.
Then I remind myself that even though I’m back to ground zero, my baby and I are in this together. We’re both in a state of limbo. He is not in the protective walls of my womb anymore so he’ll have to learn how to unravel the beauty and harshness of the world around him, independently in body and spirit. I am not housing my baby anymore but I’m metamorphosing from an old mom to a new mom so I have to be more attentive to what the stretched, weakened walls of my pelvis whisper to me. I have to be kind and gentle to my reflection and remind myself of taking it slow and trust the process. Even when my body feels strange and foreign and I can’t wait to clamber out of it back to my old self.
I have to make peace that I can no longer go back to my old self. My body and heart are transitioning to a new place that I’ve never been to before, carrying with them a brand new life, repurposing and reinventing. Slowly, steadily, gently…
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