Another Mother’s Day Post
This is a before and after.
Pic 1: This is me a month after giving birth, suffering with PTSD, PPD, and still bleeding. I couldn't stand for more than 10min without pain. Nursing was almost impossible, there was colic, thrush, & constantly watching baby for signs of health issues.
Pic 2: Is of me and A about a week ago, after picking mulberries. She's thriving and I am too. 5.5 years later. She's brilliant, I'm more than OK, and we're having some of our best times ever.
What you don't see is the thousands of dollars in medical and therapeutic treatment I received to get here. The specialists we worked with to make sure she was OK. The multiple moves and job changes we made to center our lives around us three, her growth, my healing. The many, many people who support us. The number of anxiety attacks & sleepless nights & exhaustion & night terrors and the hours and hours of crying. Her crying. My crying.
When I say the experience of becoming a mother changed me, what I mean is that it utterly gutted me and left me a cocoon of myself. A husk. It was like someone came and scooped out my insides, placed them in a box, and shipped them away. I didn’t know who I was anymore, figuratively, what with the loss of my own identity and the isolation of caretaking a newborn. But I also lost the grasp on my inner world and the way I made sense of the world around me. My thoughts were flooded with self-hatred, shame, and a panic so deep, I thought I’d run away and leave my family if only I could muster the strength to abandon them.
Thank god I didn’t. That my love for her and us tethered me to them. That I was able to stay just on this side of suicidal thoughts. That my body didn’t dissolve into panic attacks.
I was pro-choice before any of my plans led to pregnancy or a child earthside, but I am now vehemently so. No one should go through what H and I did unless they have the full and sovereign choice to be doing so. And we were lucky! I know many, many people have wanted babies and go through worse situations with less support than we did. But if someone does not want to, if someone’s life circumstances make it so they know they cannot do their very best (even at being their worst, which is how I felt), then they should be allowed to choose.
We should all be allowed to choose.
This post written in response to the leaked draft opinion by the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe vs Wade overlapping the week prior to Mother’s Day, a holiday I find tenuous at best. If you would like to support access to abortions, here is a list of organizations put together by The Cut. If you sign-up for my current May workshop - Make Your Mercury Retro-Great - a % of sales will be donated to the All Options Hoosier Abortion Fund.