I landed upside down on a terrain called New Motherhood.
With jagged corners and steep pathways, this terrain, this phase, this time of
life is hard as it is. But add to it a sense of fogginess, a feeling of
nothingness, a state of just existing and you know that you’re missing out big
time. You’re missing out on the precious moments of beauty, the brimming-over
love that fills you up along with all those postpartum hormones and aches, the
luminous memories that you make and carry through your life in a pocket in your
heart.
In a nutshell, you’re experiencing all that is difficult
about first time motherhood without being able to register or relish the
sparkling beauty in this phase, this journey.
Somewhere deep inside you, you know that something is not
quite right. You know that you’re supposed to feel differently. You know that
you don’t like your current state of being. But as much as you want to break
free from the shackles of this perplexing condition that you don’t want to put
a name to, this all-enveloping haze of dullness, this robot-like existence…you
just cannot.
Oh yes! I tried very hard. I talked to myself. I tried to
find the logic in the situation, the key to open the cage. But the more I tried,
the more entangled I became, the more the tides of this nothingness pulled me
down, the more these reams of fog knotted up around me.
And so there I stayed,
my head swathed in thick fog, my heart shrouded in sheets of ice. Like the ghost
of a person frozen in time, there I stayed in this dark realm for many months
after my son came out of the NICU.
I existed, I lived, I mothered. I went through the motions
of life like a machine fed on data, like a new mother with a postpartum
condition called…..
I won’t say the word. I can’t. It hurts too much to say it,
or even to remember it. Because I never thought this would happen to me. After
all, isn’t this something that affects people in magazines, in medical journals!
Or so I blindly believed.
It didn’t happen to happy people. To new mothers like me, who’ve been yearning to cuddle their babies. To brave mothers like me, who sit
by
their babies in the NICU, mumbling prayers and holding them to recovery.
But
I was so wrong. ‘It’ can strike any new mother, at any time. In fact, often
those who have
gone through a traumatic situation during or post-delivery. It
can creep up on you stealthily and take you by surprise, crippling your
emotions, robbing you of feeling, leaving you like a corpse existing on the
yellow gleam of hope.
*
Today, as I live in a fog-free world, my heart brimming over
with love for my baby boy, I glance back and wonder why I didn’t reach out for
help – medical and emotional. And maybe, I know the answer.
But what I want to tell you is this – I came out of that
haze, one slow , painful step at a time. I was healed with love. I was mended
and glued back to shape by my son.
Baby N helped me heal, one sloppy kiss at a time, one baby
cuddle at a time. He led me out of the tunnel, his chubby little hand in mine.
He picked up the pieces of my soul, meshed the brokenness in my heart.
He showed me through his pixie smile and abundant baby love
that we’d not really missed out on a crucial bonding phase, when he was taken
away from me after his birth. That our love runs deep. That our mother-son
relationship was formed months, years, lives before he was conceived.
As I look at him now - playing with his yellow rattle,
chasing my blue slippers, sleeping curled up against me, and feel that clichéd
kind of mother-love, I know that the fog has lifted…that I am exactly where I
should be…that all is fine with the world and life.
That I’m a new mom and this is a life that I embrace with
both arms and the whole of my heart.
Note: If you’re a new
mother and reading this – if you’ve felt anything like what I did and need
help, reach out. You can dash off a message to me or visit a friendly health
care practitioner. In hindsight, I realized this – there is no stigma or shame
in needing help when you’re in the throes of postpartum blues or postpartum
depression. It can happen to the best of the mothers – and always remember –
you’re just the kind of mother your baby needs.
P.S. For those of you who're new here: What happened before I got to the fog - pieces of that journey:
Photo credit: Sandeep Banerjee