I have been thinking of the day my son was born.
I gave birth in a Mexican public hospital, which came with certain disadvantages. For starters, I wasn’t allowed a companion. Instead, I was sent into a shared room with another eight women. There, we all waited for contractions to follow their course.
Once I was dilated enough, they took me into another room, and there, surrounded by curious interns who stared at my private parts, I gave birth.
It wasn’t like in the movies. My son didn’t cry at the top of his lungs. Instead, he whimpered as they took him aside to clean him up and do a quick evaluation.
Just a few minutes later, they placed me on a stretcher. I lost sight of my son for a few minutes as they wrapped him in a blanket. Then, a nurse came and gave him to me.
There were no ceremonial gestures, no Kodak moments. There he was, my child. I was told they were now going to take us into a room, so they took my son and placed him between my legs. Apparently, it wasn’t safe for me to hold him in my arms as they pushed the stretcher through the hospital corridors. I couldn’t help but think we must have looked like an anatomy book illustration, you know, the ones where they draw a baby inside his mother.
Once in our room, which we shared with another woman and her newborn, I had time to settle into my new reality.
I was a mother now.
Wow!
First weeks
They tell you how to get ready: buy this, get that, arrange the room, make sure everything is non-toxic…
But there’s no way to prepare. No. Way.
To me, motherhood came with a brutal post-partum depression. I know that it was because of the hormones and the accumulated stress from unresolved issues in my life, but still, it hit me with all of its strength.
I would breastfeed my child as tears rolled down my cheeks. Wasn’t this supposed to be one of the happiest moments of my life? I wasn’t sorry I had a son, but I felt completely disconnected from him.
At the time, since some renovations were taking place at my house, I had to stay with my parents for a few days. In hindsight, going to the place where I suffered childhood abuse was a terrible idea, but at that moment, I didn’t feel like I had much choice. Besides, I thought that, since I was now a parent myself, I would be able to understand them better, to comprehend why they had chosen such brutal methods to raise my siblings and me.
For the record, they did help me a lot. It was nice not having to do the dishes or cook during those first weeks, but that was as far as this interaction went. At a certain point, while I was in the middle of another crying fit, my mother came into the room my son and I were staying at. I realized she was about to tell me something important. I braced myself for the wisdom I thought she was about to impart. Finally, after so many years, we were about to bond.
“What you are feeling right now,” she said, “you are passing it to the baby. You have to stop crying.”
That was it.
Judgment and guilt.
But it was all my fault. I should have known better than to create those expectations. She wasn’t ready yet to take the leap.
Home
Eventually, my son and I got back home with my then-husband. Once I was there, I sighed in relief. I hadn’t even noticed how tense I had been.
For a few days, I thought my sadness would disappear and that being in my own home would cure me.
I was wrong.
While I was pregnant, my then-husband did his best to recover from his alcoholism. It was a one-step forward, two-step back kind of process. Once the baby was born, he got a bit better at it, but he still didn’t entirely quit. The result was a few days of peace, followed by nights of rage and terror.
I became a zombie.
I would take his verbal abuse and his threats impassively, sometimes not even crying.
And my son, where was he in the midst of this all?
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