Postpartum Ain’t No Post-Party

As adults, we are the proud products of many uncomfortable years of adolescent lessons. Early dabbles in finger bashings at the cinema, trying to smoke the contents of your parents spice rack and awkward relationships are the cringe worthy developments of our identity. I wish I could say it’s a literal ‘coming’ of age but I’d be lying- not enough teenagers know what to do with the bean.

Once you’ve left high school you have a little more ownership over how you run the race to satisfied individuality. You find space to explore your personality, sexuality, creativity, your ethical standings and whatever else you want to pursue. Your full and plump life is ready for harvesting, and you can pick and pluck whomever and whatever makes your mouth sweat. Slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, our identity develops.

Not realising the importance of my own character and identity, I undertook a simple yet incredibly complicated test to see how I’d fare with a shattered sense of self. First, I took heaps of party drugs at a Pride celebration in Central Australia and followed that with a bout of unprotected sex with my partner. Ten months after that, we had a baby. This is most likely the most offensively heterosexual way to start a family.

While it’s brutal going from a hangover to morning sickness, these were the self-inflicted cards I dealt myself and perhaps even the punishment I deserved. At the very least, the guilt and fear regarding my stint with party pills was a sign of things to come throughout the perpetual mind fuck that is pregnancy and parenthood.

From the very beginning, the pressure of parenthood bears down like a tardy foetus on your bladder at 42 weeks gestation. On one hand, a bombardment of horror stories that inevitably end in a vaganus and a suture ordeal are flying at you from all directions. To counteract that you’ll likely be told you can’t expect to be a decent mother if you can’t birth naturally and without pain relief. Though don’t tread too closely to the line and mention a homebirth, unless of course you are a negligent witch with no interest in your child’s survival.

Funnily enough, the reverse fisting your vagina receives through the miracle that is childbirth is nothing compared to the flogging of your self-confidence that is yet to come. Postpartum is no post party, people. After the feeling of elation and trepidation that I can only liken to being on a smacky pill wears off, you’re left with a six week old human, a weeping pussy and questions such as “what is baby?”.

You’d have to be a bit of a dumb-dumb to assume parenting a newborn was going to be a walk in the park. ‘Parenting is difficult’ is not a new concept. On a technical level, it’s hard enough to walk around your house without feeling as though your guts aren’t going to drop through your arsehole, let alone a metaphorical walk through green pastures.

But just in case the illusion of an easy ride is still in tact, the bleary-eyed café-culture-mothers-group-monsters bobbing little Satan on their hip are there to bring you back to reality. The constant “enjoy your sleep while it lasts” shot out like venom is sure to simultaneously prepare you for what lies ahead and ruin your last guilt free weeks of relaxation. Even still, you can find yourself lulled into a sense of security, believing the tough times are made up of sleepless nights, sore tits and realising you have a gunt. It’s a phase, you tell yourself. Just get through the first three months.

There’s an undeniable bubble that encapsulates life with a newborn, the expected tiredness, tenderness and emotional exhaustion is overthrown by the bewilderment and adoration you have for your body and your growing family. It’s why newborns come out so fucking cute and powerless. Imagine trying to bond with a toddler insisting on pulling off and passing you excessive amounts of toilet paper after barging in on your morning poo straight off the bat. Catchya.

Eventually though, the bubble pops. The community nurse stops visiting, the meals from friends stop appearing in your kitchen, visiting family head home and maybe your partner heads back to work. It’s just you and a baby dependent on your tits and care for survival attempting to get back to life as normal. But it’s not you, is it? At least it’s not the way you remember yourself. And as it turns out, the mundane, the ‘getting on with it’, is fucking dull.

“I’ve said it before but having a kid completely broke me down to nothing, and I’m still in the process of rebuilding,” my friend Reka told me.

Reka’s birth was a slog; it left her physically injured which of course added to the difficulty of her recovery. I’m sure her story is now being echoed around cafes across the country, adding to the anxiety of many more pregnant women trying to enjoy their weak latte.

The mundane madness came to a head when she realised she couldn’t grasp her old efficiency. Of course, like all good first world domestic dramas, this one involves a renovation.

“I was so frustrated, angry and frantic that I couldn’t even get one wall painted because Sadie would only sleep for 40 minutes at a time.”

“My identity was so tied up in ‘getting it done’ and being the most efficient, practical person I knew that being useless, sleep deprived and not to mention physically injured from the birth, really screwed with me,” she said.

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for ones productivity. You’ve either got it or you just don’t. Luckily for Reka, she found a doctor that must have been well acquainted with symptoms attached to a classic case of pushing-shit-up-hill and prescribed her with a glass of wine and half a valium at bath and bedtime. This of course was targeted towards her mental health rather than her efficiency.

“It honestly saved my life,” she said… most likely blissfully off her tits.

I put this dilemma out to the cyber space of mums groups a little while ago and the response was astounding. Of course, this is the best medium for asking mums a question as entertainment at home can begin to bore. There’s nothing quite like riling a mum up and asking her opinion about something on social media, while she’s being milked on the couch.

Zoë, who I actually know in the real world as well as the online mum pages, had obviously given this some thought and came back to me with the theory of panicked reactions.

To the outside world, Zoë seemed to be grabbing motherhood by the horns. An hour after her son, Teo was born she got up and emptied her own birth pool. What seemed like four minutes after that, she also got back in to her nursing degree. Of course the outside perspective so rarely matches the inside.

“I don’t actually think it was a good thing that I went back to study when Teo was eleven weeks old,” she said, admitting that it was a panicked reaction to motherhood.

This wasn’t the only involuntary response her mind gave into post birth. Zoë really let loose with the knee jerk reactions, tapping her entire life like a doctor with a reflex hammer.

Before she knew it she was moving between franticly cleaning the house and loading teeny tiny Teo into a cargo bike and riding all over town rather than catching a bus, determined to feel a sense of freedom. While she may have felt like a crazy lady I’m sure she looked like superwoman.

I can relate. When my daughter, Dot was fresh out the vag, I became obsessed with cleaning as well. Every moment she slept, I cleaned. I cleaned because I needed to have just a snifter of control over something, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be one of those mothers that live in a pool of sick and piles of washing. I had the same mentality with her sleep and my exercise, soon becoming a sleep training totalitarian. When I wasn’t crouched over her cot tapping her arse to lull her back to sleep, I was dusting the individual blades of the ceiling fan and the second my partner came home I was off to the gym.

I had to be efficient at being a mum, because in my mind I needed to validate myself; I needed to justify being home all fucking day. Of course, no one else actually gave a shit, and this is a complete recipe for disaster.

But why are we so hard on ourselves?

It’s 2018 and as modern women, we have been told that we can have it all! We can have the children, a career, a house, a small business, a partner, a domestic pet of some description and potentially still have time to pick up some sort of needlecraft we aren’t even good at. While we tip our hats to our passed sisters that have made this possible for us, we still cant help feeling a bit lost in our freedom.

We find ourselves in a situation where being a housewife doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Our culture highly values jobs, careers and achievements and we often describe ‘mother’ with a ‘just’ in front of it. We are invisible women on the lowest rungs of society, questioning our life and tactics of contraception in the Centrelink line. A lot of us devalue the role of mother; I’m certainly guilty of it! We see mums as lacking ambition and their own identity, quite happy to forgo their own dreams to be a slave to nappies, naps and night feeds. I always used to think being a stay at home mother looked like the most boring job in the world, and to a certain extent I still do (though I now disagree that it is an easier option). I want more. We want more.

The problem is, how can you even expect to define ‘having it all’? For me it could look like being a published writer who can priorities fitness, healthy meals on the table, an exceptional wardrobe and lots of time for gin. For another woman it could mean being a respected surgeon that has time to help with homework and occasionally rub one out.

‘Having it all’ is a trap. It should be removed from the feminist lexicon and thrown in the bin.

A friend of mine, Madi once told me she completely dreads being asked by people what she’s been up to lately.

“How do I even put into words what I have been up to,” she shouted while wielding a toddler.

“It would sound like a lot of cooking, cleaning, laundry, school drop offs and pick ups but that wouldn’t even come close to describing my days, and by that point the person I’m talking to would have fallen asleep.”

It’s a sentiment I have struggled with as well; I’ve always found the question to be a trigger for shame and resentment. Even going back to work doesn’t please everyone.

“Oh, only three days a week, how nice for you,” an acquaintance will state from time to time.

Though I smile and nod I really feel like screaming. Going to work and sitting down while I eat my lunch is a holiday, the real work waits for me within the walls of domestic doom. I quite often fantasize about watching our roles reverse for a little minute. In fact, I would love to see a lot of my childless peers rushing through the house in the morning tidying up after a perpetual cyclone. All the while trying to dress yourself and another moving target that has somehow just got into a bag of flour. Organising your bag, the kids bag, a gym bag and a bit of lunch and lugging them all to the car, carefully trying to avoid the snot demon coming at you with arms raised. Finally, with a bead of sweat reaching your underwear you get the kid into the car seat with three minutes to spare, only for them to point down at their nappy, look up at you and say, “poo?”

I know it’s sounding like I’m really trying to claim friendship with a lot of women here, but… Another pal of mine, Anya who was a full time artist before having her son Harry, became all kinds of antsy post baby. Not being able to create all the time was a huge restriction on her former identity. She once told me, “as soon as you push a pram around, you are invisible”. Her reaction to this is perhaps my favourite, or at the very least the most visually pleasing.

Anya is known for her bright work, grand pieces that ooze bold, vivid colours and often take up entire walls of vast urban buildings. Pent up creativity certainly burst out of her in a spectacular fashion.

“I just tapped into that next level, not giving a fuck and started wearing the most ridiculous clothing ever,” she said.

She was certainly invisible no longer. To paint a picture, highly patterned flared pants paired with an oversized top and white cons with socks that are not invisible, in fact maybe in another circumstance even a little daggy. The look would be complete with an extremely oversized jacket, bold earrings and sunglasses.

“In winter, my go to was lots of dresses with ridiculous leggings underneath and a little jacket with crazy patterns and a big jacket over that”.

“Lots of layers, lots of accessories”.

This reaction is a lesson in the ‘fake it till you make it’ school of thought and the power in treating yourself. Sure, the tactic is a completely superficial and a trivial Band-Aid for what can be a hugely debilitating problem but the point here is to actively take some control over your individuality. Solo walks, swimming laps, maybe a new Lonely Lingerie set or whatever falls within reasonable reach for you is well worth the effort. It’s no ground-breaking piece of advice and it’s certainly easier said than done but there should be no shame in spending a little time looking after numero uno. The little dependent life suckers do require you to be functioning at a rate of sanity, it’s the least you could do for yourself.

After all, motherhood is the perfect opportunity to hold up a mirror, analyse yourself and realise you’re actually an arsehole. Throughout the struggle with your new role it becomes quite clear that in fact you are selfish, stubborn and impatient. It can be quite the uncomfortable understanding. I’ve resented Dot when I’ve copped a glance of my naked body in the mirror. I’ve looked at her little face after a sleepless night with such intent and thought, ‘I hate you’. I’ve been mad at my partner for being able to go to work every day. And there were also times I was too focused on social media during a morning feed that I’ve dropped my phone right on to her head… What an arsehole.

Of course, verbalising any of this can also leave you riddled with guilt and you obviously don’t want any mothers at Tiny Tots thinking you’re ungrateful. You love your baby, but you sure as shit don’t have to enjoy them all the time, no one would ever have more than one if that were the case.

Ambitions, priorities and any expectations may fly straight out the window, down the street and into landfill when you become a mother, but you can’t deny the gems of wisdom the little bastards are. It’s got to be one of the biggest lessons of your life, an outrageous statement coming from a privileged 29-year-old woman, I know. While I’ve bitched and moaned and seriously questioned the decisions that have got me to where I am, I’m beginning to enjoy the reinvention phase. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, motherhood is just another awkward notch in the belt of our identities. While confronting, physically and mentally exhausting, being forced to adapt and grow is quite liberating; just like being fingered in the cinema. I, for one, reckon I’ll probably be dumb enough to get knocked up again. Lonely Lingerie has just bought out a maternity range after all.