it has been slightly over a month since n's existence here on earth. time is a curious thing - while i was counting down the days to her due date, i could not - for the life of me, envisage how it would be like to push out a human being who had been growing inside of me for the past nine months. childbirth itself terrified me. and now that momentous event has already come and gone. walking out of the hospital with tiny baby n wrapped tightly in my arms felt as if christmas came early. it was our first victory together as a unit of three. even looking at her now feels surreal. i cannot fathom that she is the same person who had been doing little submarines and windshield wipes in my belly - that the little fist which had surfaced to greet us from within the womb is actually the same fist which lobs us impatiently for milk now.
motherhood feels slightly different from what i had imagined in my head. i am currently writing this with a glass of white wine in hand, soaking in charlie lim's orgasmic voice in my ears (to me, his tunes scream of high school nostalgia) and keeping an eye on our sweet little angel chilling on the couch beside me. it almost feels like the old days. such days are rare, but in times like these i feel like myself again. unlike career-planning, parenthood is too complex and variable to make up five-year plans in advance. instead, we are tackling it by breaking it down into phases: phase one was our twenty-eight day confinement nanny phase, marked by wound healing, recuperation, dealing with the onslaught of new motherhood challenges (i.e. three-hourly pumps and dealing with the pain of breastfeeding attempts) and getting used to a new household dynamic of living with three additional human beings. from phase one we graduated into phase two - a life without a confinement nanny but with our relatively new helper and m still at home with me for a week. now we are currently in phase three - adjusting to a new normal with just our helper and i at home during the day. and i think we have been doing pretty well so far. i do miss not having the house to ourselves, but it has been such a worthwhile trade-off to have that extra pair of hands whose full-time job is to share our load with us. we are still not sure how things will pan out in phase four (when i eventually return to the workforce). but we're just tackling one phase at one time, at least until m is done with his exams at the end of this year. i am just thankful that god has provided so richly thus far, in the form of the people and community that He has placed in our lives.
but beyond the logistics of coping with this new normal, motherhood is also about the intangible adjustments towards this paradigm shift: dealing with an altered and battered body that has been through and continues to go through so much; displacement of hormones resulting in unpredictable mood swings; the inevitable mum guilt and pigeon-holed narratives of self-worth defined by milk production and how much one is willing to sacrifice for one's baby. to a large extent, motherhood has felt reductive: i am enslaved to the pump every two hours, counting down the hours to my day shifts alone with baby n, dreading waking up during the wee hours of the morning just to pump again. the day resets but my tasks remain the same. i feel like a shadow of my former self - almost as if those days of driving customer conversations, pantry coffee chats and putting on my "chief-of-staff" hat are so buried in the past now. motherhood surprises me bc i had heard so many platitudes about how it would be like - statements such as "you never know you can love anyone so much until you have children"; "give yourself some time, you may not even want to go back to work"; "breastfeeding is difficult but it's one of the best things of being a mother" or "when you have your own children, you'll want to give him or her the world" etc, but none of them truly resonate with me. when i gazed into baby n's eyes for the first time, i felt a huge sense of relief and gratitude, but that overwhelming flood of love i was expecting never came (it actually felt strange to have this tiny human being presented before me as my child, and i almost had to manufacture the feelings of love by telling myself that i loved her). being her sole care-giver in the two/three hour blocks during the day (while the helper is resting from taking on the night shifts on our behalf) makes me feel i will most definitely go crazy if i were to do this full-time, without help. i also made the decision to stop latching her one & a half months in bc it was painful, difficult and an inefficient use of both of our time. she is so important to me, but i do not want to make her my world - i still want to be known for who i am and what i can do in this world, outside of being just her mother. i will not trade her for anything, but she came at a cost and i still look upon my new body - the same unimaginably resilient body which grew her from a mustard seed, brought her to term and even continue to produce milk for her, and struggle to find the new me in the mirror (with a hanging mommy pooch and stretch marks peeking from beneath my shorts) attractive. i read somewhere that stretch marks are how love writes on our skin. i am still in the process of appreciating and being patient with my body which i do not give enough credit for.
before n was born, i wrote a letter to myself so that i could encourage the denise of the future, which is denise of the present moment:
"in this upcoming season, i hope you will continue to love and affirm yourself regardless of however you feel. just like how the boys who didn't reciprocate your feelings in college days didn't define your beauty and worth, so does not being able to breastfeed or give everything up for beanie define how good you are as a mother and as a person. i hope you'll continue to keep your identity separate - you are multi-faceted: you are first denise - your own individual, before you are beanie's mother. you can be both, in the same way you can fulfil your life dream of being both a young mother and a career woman...by the time you revisit this, you'll probably have gone through the unthinkable feat of pushing this human bean out. you are a champion and i hope that you'll continue to be kind to yourself. you've already done enough. you are enough."
if motherhood were ever a graded assignment, i feel i'll be a mother in the lower percentile rungs for not wanting to sacrifice so much for my child. but tonight, in spite of everything - i think i am doing pretty well. i have already done enough. i am enough.
