Six Weeks Moon

Of course, the unspeakably long flow of blood that I had been experiencing stopped the day before my six weeks post-partum check-up, as it would be necessary for my body to pretend to the midwife that I was just crazy to be mildly concerned that the bleeding took so damn long to stop. For this appointment, Tom was back at work and it was just Mimosa, the baby and I going in to make sure that everything had healed up nicely.

I do not subscribe to the baby carrier/car seat way of living, as I feel those convenient plastic carriers cause babies to be held far less than they need to be held. They also do not seem like extremely sturdy car seats to me and I am all about car seat safety. In situations like a pelvic exam, however, one starts to feel like such nods to convenience would have been smart indeed. I had visions right up to the actual event of my eight-and- a-half-year old precariously holding her tiny sister in a plastic chair in the exam room while I hyperventilated over the possibilities that could occur while I was effectively out of arms’ reach and hampered by stirrups. We did initially try that arrangement, but Marigold made her feelings about it well known before I could get up onto the exam table, so I took her back and managed to awkwardly nurse her on top of my chest during the exam.

Patricia said that my abdominal muscles were all back where they were supposed to be and in great shape and that I was doing super with the weight loss. She also checked how my vaginal muscles were doing (as in, “squeeze my finger� – the things these midwives do!) and said that they were in really great shape. She asked about sexual relations – midwives talk quite freely about these things, even in front of eight-year-olds – and I said we had done it once so far just recently and it was not really very comfortable yet and I was not really very interested yet. She did spare me the talk about helpful positions in front of the child. She asked about breastfeeding (going fine), post-partum depression (had some baby blues at first and tended towards stir-craziness but nothing serious) and if I was still interested in the mini-pill for contraception, as we had previously discussed. I said yes and she wrote me a prescription.

After some chitchat, the girls and I left and headed back home. A woman’s body is never truly the same after pregnancy and childbirth, of course, but, in just that short time, it gets proclaimed good enough, healed enough to need no restrictions, ready to roll, more or less, with all of life’s vicissitudes.

Although it takes a good year post-partum to really feel like yourself again physically if you are nursing, your body is pretty much good to go for most things by six weeks, if your pregnancy and birth were basically uncomplicated. You get more exhausted and thirsty and need lots of breaks, but you can basically make your body do whatever it has to do again. How long does it take your soul to be ready to dive into your old life, though? Six weeks? Twelve weeks? A year? Is it ever ready? Does your old life even matter anymore? Can you really go back? Do you want to? No amount of time seemed enough to me, certainly not the paltry three months of maternity leave for which I felt like I should be grateful.
My soul was never going to be the same. It isn’t that I wanted to leave my career or my life’s work behind when I had my daughters in order to stay home and bake cookies or obsess about the PTA or whatever rude simplifications might currently be in vogue with idiots for disrespecting the efforts of stay-at-home parents. I didn’t want to go back to a working mama life and I didn’t want to give up my work and embrace any old-fashioned, conservative, at-home values, either. I wanted something completely different, but I couldn’t seem to find it. Not at six weeks. Not at eight years. Not in 2004 and not even now.