A fragment from the fourth trimester
By my reckoning, I’m spending roughly ten hours a day breastfeeding. I can’t be sure because this isn’t my first baby and I’m therefore more lax with noting the frequency of feeds. Or the number of wet nappies in a day. Or the hours and minutes of sleep we manage.
With my first baby, I attempted to tether myself by logging time: working back to calculate how little sleep we got, to time feeds. I had to do this because when I fed on demand my baby wasn’t getting enough milk. We were placed on a regime of timed feeds, bottle top-ups, and amounts I needed to express from my body inbetween.
I had to do this because I was delirious with sleep deprivation and I refused to give up on breastfeeding.
Now, everything is familiar, but very different.
I’m surrendering myself as much as possible to maialogical time - which I write about here - and the only way I’ve been able to do that is by learning to accept that my job, for now, is just the work of mothering: making milk, lavishing attention upon my first-born, contact naps, and replenishing my own body.
The latter has been a particular challenge and has required a great deal of unlearning on my part. Culturally, here in the west, we accept the idea that a new baby is vulnerable. The idea of the fourth trimester well-embedded into our parenting lexicon.
But we are less sympathetic to the idea that the same level of care should be extended to the birthing parent. That they are also vulnerable for far longer than the 24 hours that are perhaps spent on a post-labour ward. For far longer than the six-week check with the GP.
The postpartum period might, I suspect, last a lifetime.
Humans were meant to birth and parent as part of a community; no-one would expect someone to be hunting and gathering a week after giving birth.
And have you ever seen a placenta?
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