REPOST: Post-partum Party

(A Blog Article for MommySteps.com.ph Written 101911)

It’s no party.  These next days after giving birth.  I should know.  It has happened to me three times before.

With my firstborn, although the Lamaze success meant being up and about in no time, I wrestled with first-time mommy anxieties, sleepless nights, incessant colicky cries, engorged breasts, and cracked nipples.  Soon as my husband went back to work, the blues crept in.  I found myself wanting to drop everything, including my baby(!) and walk away.

With my second baby, the challenges were different–a discouragingly slow recovery from an emergency-CS, an infected wound, Dequervain’s tenosynovitis (a painful wrist condition), and the frustration that I can’t give the same time to my eldest anymore.  The deep sadness hovered around me days before my husband’s paternity leave ended.

After 10 years, with my third child’s birth, in spite of the VBAC-Lamaze failure, I was doing quite fine.  But on the day my baby turned 3 months, typhoon Ondoy happened.  After two nights of being stuck with 40 evacuees in our second floor, we were rescued by our church’s rubber boats, and had to stay temporarily at my mom’s place for 2 ½ months.  The flood’s damage, the stress of living with tentativeness, anxiety over how my lone yaya could restore our home, the separation from my eldest who had to stay at a friend’s place since it was nearer to school, and my husband going back to work and leaving for a business trip, gave the crazy hormones a hard kick.  My health deteriorated, my sorrow compounded.

Now, with my 4th baby, I may be a seasoned person, but am still subject to the same post-partum lows.  I have to consciously resist expecting quick healing and getting back in shape.  I have to disregard the notion that because this is my fourth child, things should be more manageable.  I have to be makapal and holler for help.  I have to anticipate the baby blues not just by talking about it, but by embracing it. 

I am no longer who I was before.  And like any loss, I need to give myself the luxury of grief.  I am grateful that, though I have given up a lot to accommodate a lot more, I am growing.  And that, is good.

It’s 3am, and in this still dark night, as I carry baby upright to burp, the only thing I could see is his nape, silhouetted by the faint light from our neighbor. The only sound I could hear is my husband’s soft snore, signaling how tired he is and needs more sleep.  Realizing how everyone has gotten back to a normal routine, except me, makes me feel the loneliness over again. 

So I rock my son in my arms, to the rhythm of a familiar melancholic lullaby playing in my head.  I press my cheek against his softness, and it dawns upon me.  As if racing against the sunrise, the appreciation rushes in.  I thank my baby that I am not alone, after all.  I hug him tightly. Then as if on cue, he rests on my shoulder and an unexplainable peace hushes me. 

And I thank Him that I am never alone.  In this party of three.