A Poet’s Insight To The Stark Contrast of What We Expect Vs. What We Experience Postpartum

For so many of us the realities of postpartum, of motherhood, are a sharp contrast to pregnancy. Where we are once cared for and revered, we are now empty and invisible. 

And for so many of us, this transition to motherhood known as matrescence becomes the catalyst for change. Change in perspective, in career, in identity, in creation.

For poet Elana Bell, the birth of her son led to the birth of her moving book Mother Country. This poem is an excerpt that speaks directly to the reality we are all hit with after birth. 

“After Birth” from Mother Country 

Originally published by BOA Editions, Ltd. 2020

*

I am living outside of time and space as I have known it. When I walk through my neighborhood streets in early evening with my son strapped to my chest, I watch the other people going about their tasks: returning from work or school, carrying groceries or collecting the mail. It feels as though I am watching a world to which I no longer belong.

*

My husband comes home from a day at the office and complains about how tired he is. Then swoops down to kiss and cuddle and coo the baby. He does not touch me. He does not ask how I am. Only how the baby is. How many times the baby has pooped. Spit up. Cried.

Finally he turns to me.
You don’t drink enough water, he says with concern.

*

mother-hood: the cloak over my eyes, my mouth

*

Sometimes I prefer the pump to his mouth. The pump never cries. The pump never rejects my breast. Even if my supply is low.

Two of my best friends breast-feed their babies on the bright lawn of the botanical garden. Their breasts swing like globes of fruit. I pull out my small breasts and feed my son for a few short moments before he starts to cry and I pull out the bottle. My breasts fill with shame. 

*

Wanting to be pregnant was about my experience— How empowered I would feel carrying a child, pushing it through the narrow canal. How after that I would be able to do anything. I felt beautiful with my pregnant belly. I loved when people gave up their seats on the subway. I was Earth Mother. Goddess. Bearer of new life. I read half a dozen books on giving birth. I didn’t read a single one about what happens after. 

When I said I wanted a child, it was in the abstract.  Having a child is not abstract.

  *

It is true. Sometimes I leave the baby in the rocker swing after he’s started to cry, just so I can put a dish in the sink. Or pee. Or drink a glass of water.

It is true. I have thought about throwing the baby out the window. I have thought about covering its mouth, only so it stops crying for a second. So I could think.

*

I could not have known what it would feel like to hold this creature asleep on my chest, his tiny fingers hooked to my skin. His body across mine: tiny buttocks, legs curled like a frog’s, the soft hair on his back and arms. And the smell of him. I am drunk on it.

  *

In one dream, I have left my infant son at Barnes & Noble. When I come back he has curled up and made a nest on top of the shelves where I need a ladder to reach.

In another, I turn my back to speak to someone and when I turn back he is gone. Someone else tells me he’s gone down to the river. When I get there he’s on the bank, bluish pale and not breathing, but I give him my air and he shudders back to life. I am grateful. So grateful.

*

I love to change my son’s diaper. I love to watch his anus open like a tiny mouth and release the waste. I lift his meaty legs and wipe his bottom, apply the oily cream, then wrap the whole thing up in clean white cloth. It provides a sense of accomplishment that little else about mothering does.

*

Leaving the house for my six-week check-up with the midwives, I lie about how long it will take so I can stop at my favorite café and linger over a cup of coffee and a magazine, and no one expects me home.

*

Before I was a mother I was a woman who came and went as she pleased, who took her time picking out roses, who tried on dresses she could not afford, who talked about books and ideas, whose body belonged to herself and the men she opened to, who answered to nobody, who traveled the streets of India or Bali or Cuba in search of a particular stone or delicious meal or conversation with a stranger, which would lead her to the next jewel. She strung them together and wore them like a necklace. 

Before I was a mother I was a poet. I lay in bed on Saturday mornings reading for hours. I walked through the city gardens and in the streets with no particular destination in mind. I read my poems in bars where hunger and desire flooded our mouths, where we stood up when the words sliced through our thin costumes, where we drank and danced until 2 am with the workday hanging over us. There were no children there. I lived in the land of no children.

*

I find that my moods mirror my son’s.

If he is delighted and gurgling I am delighted. If he is crying and inconsolable I fall into despair. This back and forth might happen ten times in a day. Everything is better when we leave the house.

*

I walk through the garden with my son speaking aloud the names of what we see: maple, rose, azalea. The words sound new. Everything has a name.
 

*

He has begun to babble. It sounds like water passing over stones. When I stop to listen, when I am not trying to accomplish anything else but listening, I feel as though I am the stone being washed over.

*

Sometimes I have the feeling that he is still inside me. My belly slack, the thin pink scar where they pulled him out. My body does not belong to me. It is the now empty house of my son. 

He still suckles at my empty breasts until the ghost milk comes.

*

Motherhood offers one the opportunity to subvert the “I”, the ever-hungry I.” You are serving a creature entirely dependent on you with no promise of any ego reward, of making your mark on the world with your work.

*

At night, before his bath, we let him roll around naked on our comforter. He shimmies and wriggles and rubs his body against the softness of it, then looks up at us and giggles with pure glee as if to say “Look at me! I have a body!”

*

I want to laugh when I see the women flounce through the streets with their big bellies bouncing & fat diamonds on their fingers & it is clear they haven’t yet walked through the door of motherhood, still on the other side, where you plan your nursery & eat frozen yogurt & giggle over a snuck glass of wine & click click click on websites with baby names & baby gear, speaking sweetly to the little bundle you imagine in the beatific way of paintings, masterpieces of light; in fact you think you are the Madonna at the center of these paintings, though you would never say it, you think you know things about motherhood that no other mother knows, that you are better—you will avoid the knife & the food that keeps you fat—you will do it right. You don’t yet know how cruel your body will be to bring the baby out, or after, how it will betray you with blood for weeks, how you will wish you could send the baby back, this creature who sucks and cries all night and is never satisfied, who is here to stay.

*

When it is like this: his animal mouth on me, head back, eyes closed, no sound except the catch of his breath and the swallowing. I do not know how long. It’s as if we are figures in a painting. We will never leave.