Matrescence
By Erikka Durdle
My son listens to waves crashing against far off shorelines. It quiets him, lulls his curious mind to sleep. They say it’s nostalgia, the memory of the womb that soothes the newborn. I think it’s the cadence of the moon’s greeting to the coast, each tide a breath mirroring its promise of inhales and exhales.
Before my son was born, I’d planned on having a vaginal birth, no intervention. I wanted to be fully present for the moment my son entered this world. I spent hours practicing meditation, hypnobirthing, and labor breathing. My birth plan was detailed, but flexible, just like the childbirth educators from all three of the classes I took recommended. I’d taken three breastfeeding courses, too, and trained as a postpartum doula so I could be ready for life after birth. Motherhood meant being prepared for motherhood.
But my son almost died during his transition from womb to world anyway. Nothing went as planned. There was something wrong; they needed to induce. I got an epidural. My son’s vitals tanked with the increased pitocin. Labor would not progress. I was failing at this one thing all my prenatal books said was the most natural thing in the world. Birth. Motherhood.
During an emergency operation, my son was born, his cord wrapped around his face. I didn’t watch him leave my body; the blue surgical curtain separated me from seeing my intestines on the wrong side of skin. Entangled, he breathed in sticky meconium that he’d released too soon. He did not cry.
I was quaking from the drugs they’d given to numb me, each cell a tectonic plate quivering, succumbing to violence. I stared at the blue curtain. I wanted to see my son.
I begged someone to tell me why he wasn’t crying, but the surgeons and nurses turned away from me. The only doctor still by my side was the anesthesiologist, and what he said was, “Happy Birthday.”
But it was not my birthday and my son had not yet cried. I was sure he was dead. It was my first taste of that fear that shakes you dumb with rage. I held my breath until I knew my son had found his. He cried, then I wept.
My husband went with my baby to wherever it was the doctors could triage him until the NICU transport team arrived. I was wheeled to a room and left alone, still shivering and weeping, wondering when I’d get to see my son for the first time. I worried he wouldn’t know me. I worried that I would fail him as a mother, that I already had. I worried I wasn’t enough for this perfect little human, this tiny creature with eyes just like mine.
I always imagined there was a particular kind of clarity that came with a positive pregnancy test. I thought I’d be overjoyed, propelled by some innate sense of purpose. Instead, I felt nothing. Maybe I was happy, or at least, I knew to be happy. But I couldn’t wrap my mind around the implications of pregnancy, the consequences of forming a human in my body. I expressed excitement, but my interior monologue sounded something broken, like a record: I’m not ready. I’m not a mother.
Just before we got pregnant, I’d been in Maine with a friend. We hiked, sailed, surfed in the frigid Atlantic. The ocean had been my respite after a long few month teaching high school English at an under-resourced private school, lost in landlocked Southwest Ohio. I was drowning in lessons and grading for six preps, six different English classes taught to six different levels of students across three grades. And all of this during a pandemic, of course. I became obsessed with escape. I daydreamed about the salty sprays of ocean water settling in the creases of my face. The relief of each caught wave, the release of riding cosmic energy to the shore. That trip, the time spent in and on and around the water, was the last gift I’d give myself before I became someone else, myself but no longer me.
Later, I’d see those waves in my mind as a refuge during every contraction. During pregnancy, I imagined them whenever I felt the overwhelming loss of control that came with every pound gained, every modified yoga pose, every pint of frozen custard I devoured despite my best intentions. I reminded myself that pregnancy was transformation, a birthing process of its own. Losing control was the purpose, grace in the face of that loss the goal.
But if it took my son only nine months to become a fully-formed human baby, it took me years to become a fully-formed mom. My marriage taught me how to live with another’s happiness and make it as much a priority as my own. We adopted Winnipeg, a precocious beagle mutt who gave me my first taste of sleepless nights, cleaning up soiled sheets, and midnight poops. A few years ago, on vacation in Dublin and over bowls of green and red curry, my husband and I argued quietly about having a child. He did not want one. I wanted the possibility of one—a desire that had found me in my loneliness during the months of my husband’s second deployment down range. In Maine, letting the waves rock me and my board back and forth, I felt, for the first time, brave enough to try. We were pregnant within a week.
I wish I could say I achieved the goal, the grace in letting go. That completeness in transformation meant perfection. But my vanity and impatience is something I have to contend with every day. I can, at times, be forgetful of who I am now, caught up in the dream of “bouncing back” to whoever I was before. Two months postpartum, I’m only starting to understand what my body was able to do, just now beginning to appreciate its journey. I continue to have concerns about my shape and size, but less so. More important are the concerns I have about my son’s shape and size. His eating, sleeping, and pooping. I have become less of myself to make room for him, and it is a kind of dying that makes me more. More of the goodness I worried I wouldn’t be when I discovered I was pregnant. More selfless. More secure. More sure of my maternity and the instincts it drives.
In the last weeks before my son’s birth, I began swimming at our local YMCA. Swimming at 5 a.m. with just a teenager watching guard and two white haired women breast stroking up and down their lanes. The first time I did a flip turn, my body punished me for it, so I swam like a novice, pausing and pushing off the wall at the end of each lap. I wanted to swim faster. I swam as long and as hard as I could until one day my body wouldn’t let me—another way the pregnancy enforced its control. What I wanted was for my lungs to burn; what my son needed was for me to rest.
I slowed each stroke, a reluctant sacrifice. In that quieter tempo, I sensed my baby swimming with me. His turns and flips and kicks. We were swimming together, and for the first time, I felt our connection with the clearness I’d longed for in those pink lines. It’s the same connection I feel now when I tickle his toes that look just like mine, or kiss his chin—it’s my chin, too.
What the anesthesiologist actually said was, “Happy Birthday, Momma,” and I understand him now. Pregnancy is a period of physical transition, but it takes far more than nine months and a solid labor plan to birth a mother. There are days of regression, just like my son has, when I cry and miss the womb-like security of the life I had before. But then I snuggle my son close to my chest and listen to the sound of waves with him—my Spotify algorithm another reluctant sacrifice of parenthood—watching his little body expand with every inhale. I’m swimming in a sea of diapers and spit-up, finding respite in kissing away his salty tears and the rhythmic yet unpredictable tides of our shared life. One day, I’ll take him to the ocean, but for now, we’ll listen and dream of it together.
Erikka Durdle is a writer, educator, and baseball enthusiast. She is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University’s Mountainview MFA and was the recipient of the program’s Safford Book Prize for best Fiction thesis and the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize. Erikka is working on her first novel from the corner of her newborn’s nursery in Southwest Ohio. She dabbles in multi-tasking and burning homemade cookies. You can follow her on twitter @durdlealoha. This was originally posted in November 2021 and we are re-posting to provide readers an opportunity to read “during the pandemic” entries.