Content warning: medical themes
The 4pm sundown anxiety. Being jolted awake at 3am by a screaming cry. The mastitis. The feeling that nothing fits – not your clothes, not your identity, not your life.
Early postpartum was one of the hardest periods of my life. Granted I have had a blessed, easy life, but I was so naive going into motherhood. I truly had no idea how much of a shock to the system it could be.
After my son was hospitalised for breathing difficulties and failure to gain weight, this mantra came to me in the middle of the night. They’d given my tiny, 7-week-old son a feeding tube, and he’d ripped it back out again in the early hours of the morning. He was hungry and nobody had come to redo the tube, so after 36 hours awake I found myself standing in the hallway at 3am, rocking my screaming infant, milk visibly soaking through my shirt, begging in whispers with the registrar to please let me breastfeed my baby this one time.
They let me return to the shared room to breastfeed my boy. The hospital curtain only went around his bed, not mine, and my bed was under a window to the hallway, so I sat awkwardly on the cold floor next to his bed, the curtain wrapped around us, and tried to feed.
He wouldn’t latch.
It is hard, in moments like this, not to spiral. I wanted to scream, throw things, even yell at my son. I wanted to leave the hospital then and there and avoid the whole situation. I wanted to cry. But there were five other children and their mothers sleeping on the other side of the curtain, so whatever breakdown I had would have to be in silence.
I thought to myself, “This is a waking nightmare. When will this horrible night finally end?”
And some other part of my brain whispered back, “The only way out is through.”
Breathe. Relax (as much as you can while kneeling on the cold floor of a public hospital). Soothe your baby. Get him to latch. Breathe. Clench your fists through the vasospasms. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Keep moving forward.
When things feel impossible (and when things ARE impossible, which happens more in motherhood than society would have us believe), but you have no choice but to just make the moment work, remember – the only way out is through.