babywearing

How many times in the last five years I have I stood in front of a group of women and stated I was "crazy" when my daughter was a newborn? Plenty. How many times did I worry that I was making women uncomfortable when I brought up postpartum depression? In the beginning of Snowsellberryhead Studios, every single time. Not because I think PPD is shameful but rather I didn't know how to help them. As it turns out, the insanity that was my first year of motherhood has opened some beautiful doors.

Over the last five years I have travelled down the bumpy and fascinating road from pregnancy to parenthood with many families and I have learned women really need two things to find their own footing as Mothers: someone to open a space of love by speaking honestly about their own experiences and more importantly, someone to listen when they have a need and are ready to speak honestly from their hearts.

Women are brilliantly smart and instinctive when it comes to nurturing their children, and their ability to assume this role doesn't always begin during pregnancy. Truth be told, sometimes it takes days, weeks, months or even years to understand what it means to be solely responsible to nurture a small life. While we often speak of the joys of parenthood, it is often harder to talk candidly about the complex relationship between overcoming fear and achieving empowerment. So I'm going to start the dialogue today:

Wee little crying newborn baby.
Deeply pained crying momma.
Hours and hours and hours of crying.

Why is she screaming?
Why can't I help her?
I hated how her chin would quiver and shake while her face would grow redder with each wail until it reached that awful deep purple. Open your eyes baby and be happy, please? And I couldn't stop it. This went on for what seemed like forever.

I thought I was an awful mother.
There were moments where I really felt as though I was torturing my baby, ruining her by being unable to console her, comfort her, protect her.
I didn't even know how to verbalize how much pain I felt as her mother. 

She needed me to be strong and knowledgable, confident.
"Relax and so will the baby!" I wanted to scream every time someone said that. They were right. I knew they were right, but I couldn't get away from it.

While I loved this beautiful baby from the start, I was quickly overwhelmed and in over my head. Somehow love just didn't seem to be enough. I lacked skills. And confidence. What I was expecting and what I was experiencing as the mother of a newborn were two very different things.

Even more than lack of skills and confidence, I couldn't handle just how much I loved her. When she was about 6 days old I went to sleep and woke screaming from a dream about mothers dealing with the loss of their infants in concentration camps. I couldn't help them. I dreamt I was there with them and I couldn't save my child, or theirs. I was hot with sweat and shaking from fear and something inside of me broke. I disconnected from my newborn daughter.

When I woke from my nightmare I went into a state of flight and my heart built up a barrier that would keep me from living in a vulnerable state for many months. Looking back now, I remember the physical tension in my neck and shoulders, the tightening and pounding of my headaches and worst of all for me, my inability to relax enough to allow for easy letdowns during breastfeeding...it was a cycle of physical discomfort, emotional pain and exhaustion. 

I believe the dream I woke from five years ago was the night my mother bear instinct awoke within my heart - and the weight of that responsibility was far greater than I could hold. The despair set in when I realized I didn't know how to be that mother. 

Instinctively I knew this child needed something I was unable to give. I could talk circles around "new mom issues" and everyone will nod their in understanding and agreement, but the truth is much more pointed than the standard adjustments we all go through as mothers, [brave face on] the truth is that I was blindly reeling from a massive emotional system shutdown caused from traumatic sexual abuse in my childhood. My inability to protect her from a world that had harmed me gave me great anxiety and sent me into a depression that at times felt hopeless.

It has taken years of understanding and heartfelt encouragement from loved ones to help me see all of the good things I did in those early days, even now I can remember the profound feelings of drowning in a sea of confusion, lost hopes and fear. I regularly emailed friends begging them to pray for me because I felt the early days of newborn-ness slipping from my trembling hands and I longed to feel some sense of peace in being a mother...but it remained elusive.

Somehow (likely in my thousand online hours in the middle of the night...pre-facebook) I stumbled upon babywearing. I read it and I knew that this was a resource I could draw upon. My child needed me, and even though my heart was broken, she was still comforted by the sound of it beating in my chest.

I found a link to make a homemade wrap in 5 easy minutes (LAUGHABLE) and I flew through my fabric pile and didn't have the 5 metres it suggested so I frantically sewed two pieces of fabric together to make a complete wrap. It was a mix of blinding bright orange stretchy cotton terry fabric and teal green jersey knit...it was atrocious...and I followed the instructions to gently place my daughter in our newfound pocket and something beautiful happened. She rested. And then something even more beautiful happened. I rested. And then I sobbed.

Finally. She had me and I had her. We had each other. I was merely a shell of who I had hoped to be as a mother, but I had a heartbeat and she seemed content to snuggle in on my chest and rest to the gentle rhythms of my nervous cardiac tha-thumps.

Thankfully, with the support of loved ones, I had enough presence of mind to eventually grasp that my child was okay, and that we would be OKAY. We had a really rough start, but for the first time I realized that this was a relationship, which meant we both had needs that required meeting. She needed some type of closeness, and the physiological response that occurs when mothers and babies are skin-to-skin was enough to help bring peace to both of us in those dark days. Under the folds of our hideous homemade wrap something magical was happening to this mother and child.  It also allowed me to do simple things like eat a meal or go for a walk which were crucial tangible tasks that helped me out of my depression.

I was not cognizant of the initial cause of my detachment, it took some time to work through these things with counseling and support from friends and professionals. Even though I had prepared like an Olympic athlete for the birth-day, and it was wonderful, there was still a part of me that failed to realize that following the birth I'd be required to raise, nurture, feed (oh-the-never-ending-responsbility-of-feeding-small-children) and love a little human being. That looks sooooooo dense when I read it back, but honestly, I just didn't understand what parenthood was.

Not everyone has the same hurdles as I did in those early years of being a mother, but I do believe we all have the same desire, to give our best to our children. I am quite certain that if sat down and listened to every woman's story of bearing the full weight of motherhood, you'd find that she has done her very best to present love and life to her small charge.

One thing I've learned is this, while dancing with my baby is wonderful and fun in my professional life, it is only the tip of the iceberg to what carrying my child means to me. It's not just babywearing, it's babycaring. More importantly, it is just one of the things I can do to show my children how much I love them.

The days of babydom pass quicker than I care to admit, but for now, the legacy continues as our smallest one snuggles in his carrier with ear pressed to my heart so I can make room to tend to his big sister. And rather than panic about not meeting everyone's needs all the time, I know now that love is enough.