What is a life within a life?
The choices that make and break us
It has been 43 days since my dear Baby Felix was born, the same number of days I spent walking the Camino. It turns out 42 is a magic postpartum number, the number of days it takes uterine stitches to heal, for baby to establish himself outside the womb without complication, and for mom to establish her breast milk supply. Medically, it’s considered the end of postpartum recovery.
It took twenty hours of unproductive labor and a C-section for me to fully understand how much reality we gloss over and obscure when we talk about labor and birth. “Was born” is now my favorite past passive voice, without any indication of who or what was involved save the being in question. (More on this in your inbox soon).
These days, I am almost permanently attached to a 12-pound ball of writhing flesh that (who?) demands sustenance 10 to 15 times a day for 10 to 50 minutes at a time. He is perpetually latched to my breast and I, in turn, am latched to my phone, attempting to log a digital paper trail of his sleeping and feeding in order to remember what the fuck happened the day before yesterday and to relieve myself of the seemingly perpetual fear that he’s not eating enough.
The baby is aggressively refusing a bottle and so I am without relief. There is only one of me and it is all I can muster to keep up with his demands. I know (hope?) it will not always be like this. One day, he will go for more than 90 minutes between feeds. One day, he will accept a bottle. One day, I will have more than 20 minutes to myself in a 24 hour period. But not yet.
It is incredibly gratifying to give myself so completely to another being, to let their personhood subsume mine. In pregnancy, he took his life force from within, but now in life, he demands everything: my energy, my attention, my physical touch, my very blood, converted into breast milk for his nourishment. At the same time, such sacrifice is also grueling. There is no pinch-hitting wet nurse who can take over when I am exhausted and my breasts and brain need a break. Days sometimes pass without my leaving the house, my world shrunk down to the distance between the bed and the living room sofa, with regular pit stops at the changing table.
Last month, the US Supreme Court decided that the Constitution no longer protects a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, to control her reproductive health and choices without government interference. They’ve decide this is an issue to be legislated by the states. I know that Baby Felix likely never would have been born were it not for the choice I made seven years ago. I have no extreme example to offer the world in my abortion, no teen pregnancy or life-threatening pregnancy complication. I was just your average 29-year-old yuppy, unready to continue a pregnancy with a husband who was unready to have a baby.
I chose the pharmaceutically-induced “medical abortion” because it seemed easy and discrete. I didn’t understand that inducing a miscarriage would bring with it extensive bleeding, a psycho-emotional rollercoaster, and the end of my marriage. As much grief as I’ve carried and processed from its fallout, I remain forever grateful for the choice available to me.
My heart aches for the women who will be forced to seek abortions by mail, risking legal action against them to do so, because the surgical option is not available. Or, far worse, the women who will be forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term. It breaks for the women experiencing real miscarriages who will not seek medical care for fear of being accused of having an abortion. Not to mention, the women who will surely be sent to prison for doing whatever it takes to control the direction of their own lives.
No woman wants to have an abortion. I certainly didn’t. It is no one’s first option. But it is a necessary, merciful choice in so many circumstances. For many women, abortion is vital healthcare. Pregnancy is a challenging condition at the best of times. At the worst, it is life-threatening, and no woman should be forced to die for a complication that could kill her and her unborn child.
Abortion is also a fundamental pillar of legal and economic equality in a country (a world?) that is impossibly unequal, for women to be able to experience the freedom for which American independence was allegedly fought. Like the casualties of war and amputation, abortion is a moral tragedy that is also ethically necessary. I don’t want any woman to need an abortion. I want a world where women have ample, generous support to have babies with abandon. But I also know that mistakes happen. Not every pregnancy will be conceived on purpose. And everyone deserves the chance to correct their mistakes, be they health complications wrought by unknown natural causes, or her own (bad?) choices. A country where I do not have the ability to choose my reproductive future is one where I am a slave to the choices of men, a condition from which I should be protected by the 13th Amendment.
I chose motherhood with deep enthusiasm and intention. I was lucky that both my pregnancy and labor were relatively easy and low risk. I am fortunate to be able to afford health insurance that gives me access to high-quality medical care. And still the realities of infant care are enough to bring me to tears, even on a good day. I cannot imagine being conscripted into the reality I am living right now, without having chosen it on purpose.
As I glide into my seventh postpartum week, I am fortunate to have 12 weeks of paid leave with partial pay, thanks to my worker’s comp policy and New York State’s paid leave law. But 12 weeks isn’t even enough time for my son to be able to reliably hold his head up, and who knows when he’ll decide to take a bottle.
I don’t know what comes next. I know that I am a skilled and employable person but I don’t know how making enough money to live stacks up against the demands of being the kind of mother I want to be to my son, being available to feed him from my breast when he asks for it, to give him the physical love that money can’t buy. I’ve been writing this letter in my mind for weeks now and it’s been hard enough to get these 1,000 words down. It’s hard to hope for more.
I look with envy at my British friends whose government pays them to stay home with each child for an entire year. I struggle to comprehend a country that requires women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and fails to compensate them for the Herculean task of perpetuating life on Earth. As though a free breast pump makes up for the legion other demands and expenses a new baby requires.
It’s easy to get lost in feelings of helplessness and despair, of resentment and even rage. Why is this world so hard to thrive in? Why do conservative lawmakers want to enslave American women? Who benefits from such entrenched inequity?
And yet, I look down at my infant son, latched to my breast, cooing softly to himself as he nurses, slowly drifting off to sleep, and it is impossible not to feel that somehow, everything will be alright. Maybe my fears about the future are unfounded. Perhaps if I can hold deeply enough to faith—in God, the universe, and myself—the way forward will be revealed.
There’s a quote, often attributed to John Lennon, that helps me find hope in such intense moments of challenge and uncertainty:
Everything will be alright in the end.
And if it’s not good, it’s not the end.
Indeed. This is just the beginning.