Happy March 1st!
“How do you like being a mommy?”
I was face-down on a massage table for the first time in over a year. Both being face-down and on a massage table, a strange sensation, since there was not a baby bump between me and the bed. My knee-jerk reaction was to say, “It’s good”, or “it’s fine” but being a mommy is more than fine, and better than good, but to say “It’s great” didn’t feel quite right either. So I said, “I like it.” The massage therapist seemed to accept this as an answer and continued to knead out the knots in my upper back, accumulated from seven weeks of hunching over my newborn, breastfeeding her, studying her every mood, and somehow shielding her from whatever nastiness existed in the world.
The truth is, I’ve watched the sunrise on Mount Kinabalu and snorkeled the depths of the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve sat on the white sand beaches of Phu Quoc Island and sailed through the icy blue wonders of Glacier Bay. I’ve driven along the wild coast on the Pacific Highway and stood at the end of the world in Montauk. And after all of that, being a mommy is the most glorious and tiring thing I’ve ever done.
But that is too much to say to my massage therapist when my face was squished in the pillow.
I’ve managed many a meditation on a massage table, ruminating freely before I inevitably drifted off to sleep. Before pregnancy, I got a massage every couple of months if I could, (I think) one of the only acts of self-care I’d (pay to) indulge in. There’s something about someone else finding the tightness in each sinew and releasing it that maybe validates my existence. For nine months after my miscarriage, I refused any massage. I think I was scared because I didn’t want any kind of pressure or positioning to harm my baby. But also maybe part of it was punishment I felt I’d deserved. My wife finally scheduled me for two prenatal massages at a center that specialized in such things. I arrived at my appointment with trepidation, but, at nine months pregnant, I was: a) feeling slightly reassured that my baby was okay, whatwith all the frequent ultrasound and fetal heart rate monitoring, and b) feeling like I would try anything for relief, and some rest, after months of tossing and turning from side to side in my sleep. Those two massages went pretty well, so my wife gave me this postnatal massage at the same center as a birthday present. Which is how I ended up face-down, considering how I liked being a mommy.
I will say one thing. A postnatal massage should be a necessary component of postpartum care. It should be weekly or biweekly, and covered by insurance. A massage addresses both the physical and mental exhaustion of the fourth trimester. I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about how our healthcare system fails mothers in this postpartum period, and I think getting mothers a massage once in a while might be part of my endgame.
Feeling both glorious and tired is entirely new. This glorious tiredness is the difference between bored-tired, like how you feel after sitting on the couch all day, and exhausted-tired, like how you feel after hiking through the woods enjoying new scenery all day. No matter how tired I am, every day I wake up excited to see what happens next, because I have learned more from my newborn daughter than I could’ve ever imagined. I got my patience back, a virtue I thought I’d lost through twelve years of school and training and work. I had become a foot-tapping, pen-twirling New Yorker, “hurry up and wait”, “get to the gate” all the time. But there is no hurrying a baby when she is nursing or playing or sleeping. We’re all on her time, on baby time, when she’s around. And since she is just being a baby, I can be patient. As if she and I have all the time in the world.
It does mean that my time is not my own anymore. I have 15-20 minutes, stolen here and there, to brush my teeth, to shower, to type this while she sleeps. My mother-in-law being here the past two weeks has given me hours back, hours I am grateful for because doing this Media and Medicine Intensive through Harvard Medical School has given me life. At eight weeks, I feel a little more like myself again. They say it takes a village, but I’ll say this: it takes at least three women in a house to keep a newborn alive.
Baby time, my time. The last thing I realized, today in the shower: time is the only one of our currencies that is finite. But time is the one thing must spend. The minutes we put into every relationship is proportionate to the satisfaction we get back. The time I spend with my wife, with my child, with my family. How did I, at 40, just realize that?
So yeah, my baby has taught me something, and yeah, my priorities have shifted. I’ll be returning to work soon. Trying to write this and that. Maybe I have things to report, but. For tonight, I will snuggle with my daughter and my wife because my baby girl just had her 2-month shots, and, well, they need me.
Until next time, always go black tie.
