Stiches in the dark

There is a lot going on these days with having a new baby. Layers of feeling are being peeled back as the days go by. Today I am awash in the knowledge that someone sewed up my vagina. Crude to write, I know, but there it is. That’s the truth: someone made a little quilt out of the doorway to Daniel’s sweet life. And it may be too much information to share, but this week that doorway has been sore… I have shed a tear or two today of self-pity. I am so grateful for all the things that went right for me in my pregnancy and birth, and the grace in Daniel’s wee life so far. So it’s tough to balance that gratitude when the more “negative” feelings suddenly strike, armed with juicy hormones, and I start to feel the genuine shock and emotion of it all. I have always been late to process things, so I am not that surprised. Since the birth I have been in a kind of suspended animation, between the worlds, in some other place than the present. I feel it like a cocoon of protection around Daniel and me. The outside world seems so overwhelming, so many sounds and people and germs (I am no germaphobe… and I LIKE people). My days are full with just learning to feed my beautiful, ravenous baby without crying from tender nipples. I assume it’s “all normal”, that old cliché, which in a way is irritating. How could any of this be normal?? But every one of the 7 billion + people alive were born one way or another. Birth is so commonplace, a daily event everywhere, paired with the inevitable accompanying recovery, that how can a girl have an original experience? Maybe that’s the beauty of it, that connection with women through time and across the world. The shared agony and bliss. I have joined a large red tent in which millions of ears and arms and hearts know, truly know, what it’s like and “mm-hmm” in sympathy, remembering their own joys and sorrows. I wonder if this recent recurrence of soreness in my stitched parts is my body’s way of saying “wake up!”, step through the haze and be here with what happened, with what is still happening. Of telling me to reach out and join the team, to embrace this new self. I need to come out of the labyrinth, slowly but surely, my spiritual discoveries unfolding with each step.

E