The Fourth Trimester

Babies come into focus gradually but quickly, like a polaroid picture fading into color. I remember one day a week or two ago fretting because “Tommy doesn’t make enough eye contact, oh no!”, only to find the next day that suddenly all he wanted to do was look directly into my eyes and smile! I am here to witness his personality, his preferences, his taking-in-the-world as it emerges, with force and zest and nuance, and daily variation. Sometimes when he wakes up from naps now it almost sounds like he’s shouting my name — I know he isn’t, but his vocalization has that sort of authority, asking me to come back to him, like it’s something he knows he wants. There’s a self-awareness that he’s gaining, slowly but very surely. He wants things, he makes choices. 

I could keep on waxing poetic about my baby for pages and pages, easily (I’m obsessed with him, a new mother’s right!), but this essay isn’t about him. I don’t want to treat his life like it’s something that can be written, I want to let him go on being a little mystery, someone to be with instead of analyze. It’s myself I want to unpick, put down on the page, pull apart, tease out. I want to write my motherhood, I want to pay it attention, make some sort of sense of what is changing in me. For eleven weeks now I have been a mother, and I don’t feel myself coming into any sort of focus. I feel a little fuzzy, like the polaroid shot out of the camera and then stayed stuck in a sort of blurry greyscale. What is my way through this newness? Especially as I begin to get the hang of things, as my baby and me fall into a sort of new understanding, new ease, the uneasiness becomes more clear in my mind. How in the world will I come back into balance? If I can figure it out, it will be such a different sort of balance than I’ve ever known before in my twenty-seven years. What do I do with that? 

I’ve almost made it to the end of the fourth trimester, what they call the first three months postpartum. The phrase suggests that the baby is sort of still gestating and the mother is sort of still pregnant — like a liminal space between birth and life. At the tail end of the fourth trimester, my baby is emerging with such clarity and force. He wants to live! Hello! It’s me who is stepping forward slowly. It’s me who isn’t quite ready yet. What, I’m supposed to go on living? What, there’s a life to return to? Maybe it’s the pandemic piling on top of my postpartum weeks, but I think there’s a big part of me that really believes that there’s no life after this endless cycle of sameness, days and days at home doing the same small quiet things over and over and over, no new thoughts, no new ideas. I realized this week, I could put my baby in the car and drive anywhere, anytime. I thought about that and realized that I simply didn’t want to, simply didn’t feel I had the energy or the desire to go to any particular place. Even if there weren’t a pandemic and I could go anywhere at all, where would I want to go? The museum? The library? The river? The cafe? None of them pull me the way they once did. The cold is an excuse to rarely even take walks outside. I circle my house indoors, in slippers and pajamas, with my baby in my arms, looking out every window. How is that enough? It is somehow. It has been for nearly three months. I can manage no more. My home has become my universe, for better or for worse. 

To leave now almost feels frightening, but I know I will have to, for my baby if not for me. There’s real fear for me in the fact that my life will never be the same as it was again. To re-enter the world now will never not be complicated. Pandemic and pregnancy both have skewed my world beyond recognition. There is so much to grieve, so much to miss, and to try to process the newness, to try to figure out a way to step into it, takes an energy that I can’t quite figure out how to muster. It’s a comfort, honestly, to know that I will go places and do things because my kid will want to or need to. In some ways, he will give the world back to me. I’m not sure I would know how to seize it on my own. On my own, I think I could stay at home forever. And oh, wouldn’t that be terrible? 

And it’s all a metaphor, you see? Like the fourth trimester is my house, and what’s next is, what, the whole world? I don’t know, I don’t have enough brain-energy to write it gracefully, but you get the picture. 

I keep thinking about the phrase “action and contemplation.” My main reference for it is the spiritual education organization that Father Richard Rohr founded in New Mexico — The Center for Action and Contemplation. You know something is wonderful when the name or title alone feels like a poem, drives you to deep thought. Action and Contemplation. Such a beautiful non-dual dualism — because of course contemplation is active, and action is contemplative. But the dualism is helpful here, at least for my mind. My life was once one of so much contemplation. I would start and end each work day with deep solitude. Morning pages in the morning, a noontime walk with my dog, quiet hours of self-directed work, shifting from reading to writing to finishing tasks for my creative small business. To remember this now feels like some sort of fantasy. It didn’t feel idyllic when I was in it — nothing really ever does. I often felt lonely or frustrated or stymied by some sort of problem I was trying to work out, some sort of discontent. But now, just as I know I will look back at these days with my baby with a sort of wistful longing, I feel a longing for that time. When will contemplation return to me? How will I find it again? These days since giving birth have been filled with such action, task after task after task. Lifting, carrying, feeding, dressing, bathing, responding, responding, responding. Worrying about every shift, every change. Problem-solving, keeping track of things, endlessly. I’m exhausted at the end of every day. Still, there is a certain satisfaction that I feel in the doing that I couldn’t quite muster in the days where most of my work was thought. I will name that, the self-satisfied and discrete pleasure of action that eclipses the sort of never-finished feeling that contemplation espouses. But the exhaustion, the sort of emptiness rather than fullness that I find in my mind as I act and act and act. Where is my mind? How have I lost it so completely, so terribly? What should I do? I cannot gather my thoughts. Even writing this feels difficult, and I’m filled with self-doubt as I type — “is this really what I mean?” That’s unusual for me. When I have more space for contemplation, “what I mean” is constantly right at the surface. I can so quickly say what I mean to say. It’s what makes me sure that writing is some sort of vocation for me — it flows from me like a river. But now, my own thoughts feel distant. Nothing flows. All dried up. It’s a miracle that I’m writing at all.  

I don’t know that I’m suited to such action, or at least not without the balance of contemplation and solitude. I feel somewhat lost, my mind so quickly looking for some sort of comforting occupation — endless podcasts or scrolling, the need for dopamine or distraction at every moment to push out a sort of vague dread that seems to be tailing me closely. I’m doing okay, but just barely. My baby truly delights me, but there’s a real fear behind that delight. And I’m at the high end of the spectrum, having a baby that is sleeping, eating, and behaving generally favorably, a body that is well and healthy, a life that is calm and includes everything I need. I can’t imagine anyone doing better that this — which leads me to even deeper amazement at this transition I’m experiencing. To become a mother is to be emptied and not quite filled. To become a mother is to be flung, thrown, swung into a jungle. Here, figure out how to live! 

When my life and my work was mostly contemplation, I needed action to balance the scales. Needed to go places, do things. Take a walk! See some art! Eat a sandwich! Browse the bookshelves! So I did those things, and they felt good. But now that my home life is action, action, action, that bucket is full. What I need is contemplation. All I want is to go to a cabin somewhere, dead silence, near big water, and be silent for a week. I want to be cloistered, I want to be quiet. I want a writing desk. I want to make something huge. I want to ponder, wade deep in my mind, be thick in a long and drawn-out project, one so big I get lost in it. That’s so impossible right now. 

Of course motherhood is contemplative too. It holds action and contemplation both. I will find new contemplation in my role as a mother, already do as I nurse my baby and let my mind wander, when I don’t fill each loose space with podcasts and endless scrolling. There’s space for contemplation, I’m just not taking it. Why? Maybe it’s scary. Maybe it’s too painful to really try to unpack what’s different in me. Maybe I don’t know yet. Maybe I’m not ready. I can’t tell. I always feel disoriented when I can’t find my center, and I feel profoundly knocked off balance, wobbly, dizzy, fuzzy, unsure. I’ll find my balance again, but when? 

In motherhood, I’m learning a sort of economy of energy, a real budgeting of myself. There’s not enough to go around. As I write, I’m realizing that maybe that’s the root of my frustration, my feeling of being thrown off. I wish I had enough energy to simply add motherhood on top of my old way of being, my old amount of output, my old sense of balance in myself. But that’s simply impossible. Motherhood takes up entirely too much space. All this action has been required of me. You can’t not respond when the baby cries. But contemplation — extra! It takes energy too, energy that I don’t have enough of. I’ll need to pinch some pennies in order to find it again. But would that mean expending less energy in my action, in my caretaking? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. This is where the “mom guilt” could so swiftly and devastatingly sweep in. This is where it already has, in big ways and small. (But that’s another essay entirely, one I don’t have the strength yet to write.)

I’m relieved to be almost clear of the fourth trimester. There’s such promise ahead, so many of the things you imagine and dream about when you’re awaiting a baby. But I’m also sad to be leaving this strange waiting room, this life before the life. For the past weeks, I’ve been not only a new mom, but the newest mom, someone with a newborn, someone of whom really nothing is expected or required except existence, survival. We support people in the fourth trimester, bring them meals, ask them lots of questions, offer to do whatever they need. Of course there’s lots of opportunity for support after the fourth trimester, of course, but it’s different. In the fourth trimester, you’re allowed to be freaking out, to not know what’s going on, to be all out of whack. But afterward, you’re supposed to start to live. You’re supposed to get back to work, to reemerge, to INTEGRATE! 

I’m resisting that expectation. No, my life will never be the same. No, I will never be “back to work” in quite the same way until I have either lots of childcare or until my kid is in school. I will reemerge, I will integrate, I will have to, I want to, but it will be slow, strange, on my own new terms in this new country of motherhood. This is an ongoing thing to wrestle with, not a problem to solve, something to resolve. And it cannot be skipped that I’ll always be missing my tiny baby, I’ll always be awash in the newness. That will take up space in me too, from now until eternity. The greatest loss in leaving the strange, hard, safe-haven of the fourth trimester is leaving behind my newborn, falling in love with my baby instead, then my toddler, then my kid. I’ll cherish the memory of his distinct tininess, his resemblance to a bird, his body limp and soft like a noodle. He smiles too much now to be a newborn, he has too many opinions already about how he wants his world to be. How wonderful, but I miss each earlier day of him. Missing takes so much energy, is active and contemplative at once. And it will only get bigger and louder in me, the tiny grief, tiny joy of your baby growing up constantly, endlessly. I’m learning that that’s one of the deepest wells of motherhood (and there are so many, so many) the loss of each day with your child, the past following behind you with a sweetness that cuts to the bone. That is my private contemplation, my long project, my novel, symphony, quilt — saying hello and goodbye to my baby, and to myself as his mother, every single day.