From my corner on the sofa, I watch the red maple leaves waft to the front yard outside the living room window. This year, I find the seasonal herald to winter comforting. Brisk tromps in the snow will follow the leaves. Cozy months will pass inside. Now I can look ahead.
I look down at Owen, my drowsy, nursing, one-year-old son. We’ve spent
An equinox birth throws life off-balance.
hours on this sofa corner since his birth last September. From his vantage point, the view is always the same. From mine, with the view out the window, it’s been relentless change.
In the first weeks of his life I watched the maple leaves turn from green to yellow to orange-red. They floated to the ground, leaving stark branches against a cold, gray sky. I imagined the tree might feel as helpless as I felt as a new mother, powerless to stop its once lush, full canopy from withering and dying.
Inside, I wanted to turn back to our days as a couple, before my husband and I ever conceived the notion of parenthood, let alone a baby. Our son’s care was a chronic round of unrewarding drudgery: Feed, sleep, wake, change, soothe, repeat. After his first week at home, any maternal joy was smothered by anxiety, exhaustion and resentment. Life as I’d known it had withered. The birth that had come, ironically, with the autumnal equinox had thrown me completely off balance.
Late fall can be cruel, watching the trees’ blazing coats become tatters, knowing that inevitably, all must succumb to the wind, wet and winter. Last fall, it was colic that snuffed out the color in our lives. The crying was worst in late afternoon, coinciding with my husband’s return from work. I became a clock-watcher, willing those wails to wait until Mike at least had got in the door. I usually lost. We played pass-the-baby for four hours, until exhaustion finally led to sleep. Minutes later, we too were in bed, clutching each other for comfort, emotionally as bruised as the mottled gray sky. Oh, how I wanted those trees leafy and green again, as they were during my pregnancy, when we imagined only the fulfillment of becoming a family.
November. First snowfall. Wet, heavy snow, the kind that falls around 30 degrees and melts in two days. It plastered the naked maple branches. One 2 a.m. feeding, a sharp crack pierced my drowsy stupor. I got up from our sofa corner and peered out at the dark back yard. A huge branch had cracked off the old white pine, the heavy wet snow too much for it to bear. Frosty needles wiped the glass of the sliding door as it rested on the patio.
Later I would notice how crazily that branch had grown from the pine’s trunk, jutting out at an unsustainable angle. It was no surprise it yielded to the pressure of the snow, but I never considered it might fall. Nor did I see the metaphor it made to events on my side of the sliding door.
Some time before Christmas. I took Owen to run errands. Snow that was staying covered the streets. An opaque, dirty white sky blurred into the earth at the horizon, giving me the sense of occupying a fishbowl. I parked on the bridge over the river. We ran our errand, then returned to the car, me pushing his stroller through the sidewalk slush. From the corner of my eye I noticed the cold, frothing river. The car seat is heavy. Owen is strapped in. I could just drop this in, and it would all be over.
The thought wandered through my mind. I felt detached from it, like my mind was a marquee and this was today’s message. I felt no urge to act, to actually dangle the car seat over the bridge and release my grasp. I was merely a bystander to the emotions playing in my head. That was the scariest part: Not that such a thought could percolate up from the trough of my postpartum mind, but that I reacted so numbly, as if it were unremarkable. I snapped the seat in the car, shut the door and drove home inside the dirty white fishbowl that was my world.
Winter deepened. We approached the three-month mark. This was the crossroads. Even the few parents who would confide that they, too, had struggled with infancy assured us Things Would Get Better at three months. Instead of feeling like fumbling novices, rushing to our library of parenting books with every question, we would be competent, confident, instinctive parents. We could decode crying, soothe and comfort on demand. Another seasonal coincidence held tantalizing promise. The three-month mark fell on Christmas. If true, it would be the best Christmas present ever. It was also just days after the winter solstice, the return of the light. After living in a world shadowed by tormenting regrets and wishful thinking for three months, I willed for light again.
But those other parents were wrong. Things did not get better. Instead they deteriorated with every January day. My snowbird mother-in-law returned from her Florida home to lend a hand. From my corner on the living room sofa, the world looked cold and bleak. We’d dragged the broken pine branch off the patio into the backyard. Snow would cover it, then melt, exposing broken, dead, ugly branches. As a mother I felt broken, dead and ugly, too. “I want to like it more,” I told my husband one night. Talk about the awful truth. Owen was crying less. He was sleeping more. He smiled sometimes. But though I loved him, I did not like being a mother. Like the pine branch that cracked under the wet snow, I too broke down. I called a counselor and made an appointment.
I never thought I would welcome February. In February, winter becomes wearying. February teases with its thaws and lengthening daylight, yet the knowledge that winter’s grip won’t relent for at least another month. Last February, though, life finally relented. On the recommendation of my counselor, we arranged part-time child care. Owen’s sleeping improved. He started eating food in addition to nursing, relieving the pressure I carried to be his sole source of sustenance.
But it was the child care that was balm for my wracked psyche. These were golden hours, 16 of them each week that nurtured my starved soul. Time to work, to write, to feel competent at something. I started to anticipate the days again. Knowing respite was available, I unexpectedly began to enjoy my hours with Owen.
Spring beckoned. From the sofa corner, watching the maple tree begin to bud out in the front yard, I realized our kinship. All living things need time to replenish. Fertility and dormancy are a necessary cycle. As mother and son, our relationship started to truly flourish as the buds unfurled into the first of the green, green maple leaves. In the backyard a rhododendron, formerly shaded by the fallen pine branch, bloomed this spring for the first time, a gorgeous deep fuchsia.
Like the rest of the landscape, Owen and I ripened together in the warmth of summer. Mother is still the most draining, demanding role I’ve ever attempted to fulfill. But this fall, as I sit with Owen on the sofa corner, watching the maple leaves once again flutter to the ground, I feel no longing to return them to the tree.
* * * *
Dear readers – this essay was written upon my son’s first birthday in September 2006. (That’s him below, blowing out the candles at his fourth
Four years ago, I couldn't have envisioned a birthday celebration
fete last weekend.) My hope in publishing it now is that it will help balance the fairytale so many women are led to believe about motherhood. Unrealistic expectations and the feeling that I was alone in disliking and regretting this life-changing role worsened new motherhood for me.
I’ve recovered fully, and even had a second child, now one year old. With my expectations of motherhood more realistic, I did not experience post-partum depression with her. I hope that also helps women for whom PPD is a real and present threat to their well-being and that of their family. So please forward and link to this post. I’m glad to join This Mommy Gig — and I promise to be shorter in the future.
I’m not writing a column today.
