Some of us have heard of the book The First 40 Days, which details the postpartum period during which new mothers need to be nourished and cared for as they learn to become mothers. There will be. This can be seen as a kind of resistance to social pressure for “bouncing back” after childbirth. There’s a lot of wisdom here, but of course for many moms, getting prescribed, carefully prepared meals, and perhaps even more leftovers, can be difficult. After each of my two children were born, my well-meaning herbal sitz bath went unused and sat in the bathroom cabinet for the better part of a year before going in the trash. It took much longer to “get back on my feet” than that. In fact, the concept of recovery, of going back to an earlier version of yourself, to who you used to be, turned out to be false for me. I experienced a re-emergence into a different kind of world, but in my case it took years, not days or months.
A few days after my husband and daughter were born, my husband encouraged me to take a walk around the neighborhood. He suggested I go alone, but I couldn’t stand the idea of being away from my baby, who was only a few weeks old, so I decided to take her with me. I can still see her tiny body floating in the middle of the giant stroller basket someone gave her at a baby shower. (I was new to parenting and didn’t yet know how to use the Bjorn Wrap I bought or the many benefits of baby carriers.) The light outside seemed incredibly bright and the sounds were too loud. Gia probably agreed. After a few minutes she started crying and I rushed home with her. We went on many more successful walks in the months and years that followed, but part of me remained surrounded by her, wondering where exactly I belonged in the wider world. I didn’t understand. My father had cancer before I was pregnant. The first time Gia and I went to see him, she was two months old. He swore he would be able to eat again and be strong enough to hold her. That never happened. A few months after her first birthday, I went to the hospital in Ohio where she was scheduled to undergo life-saving surgery to say goodbye to him. When the pandemic hit a few months later, I already felt like I had withdrawn into another realm.
In my metaphorical cave, as I was learning how to be a mother, grieving my father, and trying to process the events of our shared world, I wrote: I wrote a book called Exposure. I wrote about the multifaceted grief of losing a parent. I’ve written about the intensity of being a new mother, and I’ve written about mothers, longing for them, and how their presence and absence affect our lives. I remembered my kind mother, whom I had often admired, who passed away the summer I graduated from college. I wrote about the power of female friendship. Even when I was in hiding, I wrote about my artistic ambitions and my hunger to be seen. In order to gain the courage to write this book, I pretended many times that this book would not be read, but I knew that the hunger was still inside me. I wrote about the pain of failure. I wrote about how I saw this world in which we were raising our children. There were deep divisions in that world, a broken nervous system, and little room for the empathy that might heal us. I wrote about how things look from different perspectives. I wrote this because I wanted to leave room for complexity. I wrote it as a way to reach myself.
I continued writing during my second pregnancy with my son. After my son was born, I had planned to follow the “first 40 days” rule and stay home, rest, and eat the right foods to heal my body, but in the end, when my son was just a few days old I decided to go out to take it. To take a coronavirus test. She tested negative so we went to the playground afterwards. I felt I had to prove to her that I was still a mother to minimize any anxiety she might feel about our separation after the birth of my baby brother. Ta. I had planned on using a meal delivery service, which was recommended by my midwife, even though my budget had grown. That way, I could feed my grass-fed shepherd family pie and chicken porridge twice a week for the first month, saving everyone the hassle of feeding. cooking. It was a luxury. It was a blessing to me and something that many new mothers don’t get to experience. But it didn’t solve my depression. Every time I took my newborn son to the pediatrician, I was given a mental health screening form for new moms. I checked all the boxes and had no issues. Fifty-fifty, I’m fine. Part of me knew all too well, but deep down, admitting that I was struggling and feeling defeated meant that I had somehow failed at this most important job of all: motherhood. I was afraid it meant I was there. So I hid instead.
When Kate, a mother at my daughter’s preschool and also the same age as her newborn Dominic, asked how I was doing, I said the same thing I always said: “I’m tired, but I’m glad!”
“Really?” she asked. I nodded. “Because this is a big deal for me,” she said, or something close to it.
“Oh,” I answered. Faced with her honesty, I immediately let my guard down. “Yeah. I know. That’s right.”
Maybe there was nothing wrong with me after all. Maybe it was just hard. Kate and I teamed up with Marina, another new mom of two in kindergarten. We had all lost our mothers. We were all able to be honest about our struggles. Their friendship became a lifeline and my first step back into the world. After dropping him off at daycare, it was another half-step when I went to Kate’s office at Netflix for some exposure work and started pumping in an empty conference room for my still-nursing son.
It took me a total of seven years to write the book, which I started writing in the early stages of motherhood. My daughter is now 6 years old and my son is 2 1/2 years old. Ultimately, it illuminated my path through grief and much more and brought me out of hiding. Being released made me feel vulnerable, but it’s a good kind of vulnerability, a necessary risk that comes with allowing your work and yourself to be seen. Now, to prepare for my book event, I’ve finally changed out of my uniform of oversized hoodies and workout leggings, put on some lipstick, and picked out a dress that fits my body as I am, not the way it used to be. I am. I bought a pair of pink heels that I can’t go anywhere with my kids in tow. It feels like some sort of ceremonial sign to end my long postpartum period. Of course, it’s not the clothes or the shoes that matter, it’s the ability to go out again and marry your own identity and being both a mother and a writer.
Eva Delilah is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels In Search of Us and Love Letters to the Dead, which have been published by Apple, Google, BuzzFeed, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library. It was chosen as the best book of the year by. Exposure was recently published. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow, and the University of Chicago. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently lives in Altadena, California with her husband and two young children.
