A Child's Image Burnt Into The Flowers

Notes from the first week with a newborn baby

Last Sunday morning at 5:53 A.M, September 25th, my daughter Samantha was born.

The words “my daughter” still sound so foreign to me. An odd and twisted shape on my tongue, something that makes my heart ache as it tries to initiate itself into my new understanding of reality. My daughter. It throbs in my throat. It makes the back of my spine ache.

I’m currently writing this at 3:30 in the morning with Samantha asleep in my lap. I’ve finally figured out a good position to be able to type and hold her at the same time. I don’t know when I’ll go back to my regularly scheduled posting, as newborns are a little demanding, but I’ll write sporadically as I’m able. Here are some of my notes from her first week of being alive.

• The entire process of labor from the time my water broke to when Samantha was born took almost twelve hours exactly. Time began to dilate and stretch. It bubbled underneath me and I began to live within a warm moment that existed outside the ordinary flow of seconds, minutes, hours. It was like a natural hallucinogenic. It all had the feeling of being a religious experience, both mystical and unreal.

• I think oftentimes significant moments in our lives are only understood to be significant in retrospect. The moment I heard Samantha and the doctor laid her on me to hold I felt my old existence shatter. Everything became different in a clean, broken line.

• She smells like a soft woodland grove, a twilight and safe circle that exists in a world without dust

• l thought I had several weeks to prepare, so I hadn't packed anything. But maybe a part of me knew, because yesterday and that morning I’d cleaned the house and written up contact info and what we needed to pack before going. My water broke around 6 p.m. while i was making dinner and I bent over to feed one of my dogs. I forced mysef to move with purpose, slow, as Robert and I went around the house gathering everything we needed. I felt calm when Robert dropped me off at the hospital and I walked up to the front desk and told them I was in labor, when I signed myself in and presented my ID. Everything was already in its right place.

• The contractions started on the ride to the hospital, but only became extremely painful about six hours in. I only asked for the epidural when they became too painful for me to think or speak through. Even though natural labor and at home birth is in vogue, I found a safety and peace of mind of being in the hospital surrounded by professionals, and was able to relax when the epidural kicked in, enough to get some sleep and listen to ASMR on my phone. Another 6 hours of unmedicated contractions would’ve made me extremely exhausted and stressed when it came time to push.

• I think it does a disservice to women to call birth “traumatic” as a matter of course, Trauma is a physiological response gone wrong. It’s when the nervous system cannot process past memories. Trauma does not just mean pain. It’s an intense process, and I think it does change you forever, but that’s not trauma. That’s significance. That’s revelation. 

• I thought I’d find feeding and holding my newborn to be boring, but I’m endlessly fascinated staring at her. Just watching her nurse is engaging. It’s like staring into a mirror of my future self, a promise bound in blood, ancient stars, small eyes that will soon swell and grow and see, heated and mixed in her parent’s DNA.

• I used to daydream about going into the past and changing it. I wanted a family that loved me in the way I needed to be loved. I wanted to hold my arms out without flinching. I wanted to look into the mirror and stop seeing the ghost of a wounded child, smudged charcoal where my heart should have been. I have lost count of the hundreds of hours I cried because I could not go back and reverse time. Now I see that there was another way. Another way to be whole. It was forward.

• I so desperately want to be normal sometimes. The fact I can get pregnant, carry a healthy baby, and fall in love with her is a relief. It’s a testament to the fact that my damage hasn’t penetrated the core of being. That there’s something uncorrupted inside of me - something that does not care I see myself as rotten and crumbling soft.

• We had to stay in the hospital an extra night because Samantha’s bilirubin was a little high and she needed light therapy. Although they ended up finding a room for us they initially told me I would have to leave her as they’d run out of beds. I immediately started sobbing at the thought of leaving her behind. It was a primal, searing ache. I’d never felt anything like it before.

• All of my doubts about wanting children dissolved when she was born. It soon became the only clear and bright road. I saw death then, everywhere else I looked, an emptiness where alternative promises used to be. I had many glittering alternative futures once. They all had their own special, shiny gloss. A life in Paris as a feminine flaneur, with a rotating cast of lovers, nights spent drinking wine and smoking cigarettes with fascinating strangers. A life in a bayou town, living in a shack by myself, miles away from anyway else so I could write in heated, green seclusion. A life in Los Angeles, writing by day and working as an exotic dancer at night, shivery high on cocaine and tequila as I strutted in clear lucite heels. They all died. The shimmer faded. It revealed the laughing skull underneath. None of those futures would’ve made me as happy as my current present.

• Family really is the only thing that matters. And I mean real family, the people who actually care about you, who have determined to move with you through life. It’s the only thing that’s ever made me truly happy. Even the things that I’m passionate about, like writing, lose their significance and ability to make me feel joy if I don’t have someone to love.

• Having a child feels like experiencing a new realm of terror. There is something that exists outside of your body, but is also you. All of a sudden there are things worse to lose than the self.

• I couldn’t have done any of this without Robert. I feel safe and warm in my nest with Samantha as I recover from labor and tearing, and I’m able to focus on her and recovering without having to worry about the outside world. It’s a reminder that people are meant to work as a team. The concept of rugged individualism, without obligation or responsibility, quickly disappears in the face of such a huge responsibility and interdependence.

• I was terrified of postpartum depression, but I’ve done a lot of internal work to prepare for this moment. The exhaustion is brutal, and I have to be constantly vigilant now, but I actually like the structure and the importance of each moment. Before it felt like so many days were wasted. Nothing feels wasted anymore. Everything around me has taken on a new dimension - even the mundane stuff I used to hate, like folding laundry or organizing supplies in the bathroom - it all shines with a kind of occult light. The chemical drop after birth doesn’t have to lead inevitably to depression,

• I’ve been staring at Samantha for so long that I see her image everywhere I look. In walls, in the folds of bedding, burnt into the images of flowers. A sweet babies face, interposed on reality, over and over again.

• I keep thinking of all the women in the past who had to give birth alone, unmedicated, without a hospital or anyone else to help. I see a woman going into labor alone in a cave by the sea, her contractions coming in and out with the tide. Her hair is overgrown, gritty with sand. Her eyes trap the moon, and with each push she begins to feel more and more like the moon. Her intense pain becomes its own special kind of gravity. She swells alone, shivering and unable to think. Her body turns into a dream that the ocean has at night.

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