Born for this: No one knows how to hunker down like a new mom
By: Jennifer Pemberton
Tags: Maternity Leave, Newborn, Quarantine, Pandemic, New Mom

Born for this: No one knows how to hunker down like a new mom Jennifer Pemberton Mar 26·6 min read

A rare smile on my first day home from the hospital with my pre-term baby after a traumatic birth, Sept. 2017. (Jennifer Pemberton)

A year ago this week is when we got our hunker down orders in my town. That’s what it said in the official documentation: “hunker down.” Because it wasn’t enough to just stay home, I guess. A lot of people freaked out when their local or state governments told them to weather the pandemic at home. Remember the way they purchased toilet paper with abandon? Because a lot of people had never done this before. They didn’t know what they would need to wipe with what. Or how often.

But, there is a whole class of people who knew exactly what to do when those orders came down. Because we’d done it before. We knew exactly how many wipes we’d need. And what kind of snacks and drinks and pills we’d want within arm’s reach. We knew what it was going to take and what it was going to do to us.

When I walked in the door from the hospital with an infant born a month before my due date, I plopped myself on the couch and didn’t get up for what turned into weeks. I had spent more than 40 hours in labor. I had begged for death and then fought it and then succumbed to a fentanyl dream state while undergoing an emergency C-section. The spinal block meant that I couldn’t feel pain, but I could feel everything else. I could feel someone’s arm pushing the baby back up through my pelvis to be born feet first out of an artificial vagina cut into my abdomen.

I spent the next several days in the hospital on a morphine drip, with a catheter draining my bladder and someone with a degree in this stuff to come in and attach my baby to my breast for me. I wanted to stay there forever.

But one day, someone (not me) decided that I was ready to go home. And then I was home, but I couldn’t get up the stairs to get to my bed for more than a month. So, I slept on the couch. No, not slept. I stayed on the couch, through cycles of night and day. The nights brought hormonal sweats that left me soaked and shivering in my sleeping bag. I just held my baby all the time so I wouldn’t ever have to get up. Even the tiniest premie diapers were too big for him, so the pee just constantly ran out of him, and onto me. I went very long stretches without bathing.

I took a Percocet every four hours when my alarm went off. I took 12 capsules a day of fenugreek, which was supposed to help my milk come in. Instead, I just sweated it all out so that I smelled like kombucha. Somehow, tears could pour out of me, but the milk just came in drops.

I wasn’t supposed to have a baby for those weeks. He was supposed to be gestating still, and I was supposed to be sitting around, putting my feet up and eating whatever I wanted. I was supposed to still be at work, editing news stories through the slight distraction of getting kicked in the ribs by my fetus. He was supposed to be an abstraction in my expanded body. I was supposed to be getting a pedicure the day I went into pre-term labor, chatting and laughing through my fears with a friend while someone painted my toes the color of my selection even though I couldn’t see my feet at all.

Instead, I was reduced to a human heating pad. Instead of glowing with pregnancy, I glistened with body fluids. Instead of looking through books of baby names and having chats with my husband about family history, I scrawled drug-induced flickers of ideas on a sheet of paper. It was the same piece of paper I used to note how many minutes of breastfeeding I had endured on each side and how many milliliters of milk I fed my baby through a tube taped to my finger. There are charts from those days with columns for my left and right nipples and names like “Junco” and “Corvid” scrawled in the margins, because all I could I think of were the birds I could see out the window and there was no room in my brain for creativity or meaning.

When you are at home with a newborn, the common advice is to try to accomplish one thing a day. Some days that meant showering. More often it didn’t. One day, two or three weeks in, it meant leaving the house, walking down the five steps of the stoop and past two houses to the end of the block before turning around and walking home doubled over in pain and crying from the effort. Sometimes, the one thing was sending a text to someone important to me who I’d completely forgotten to tell I’d had a baby. One day, more than a week in, it meant sobering up enough from the pain pills to fill out the forms from the state vital statistics office and actually giving my child a human name.

I was truly hunkered down then, chained to the couch by my very physical maternal responsibilities. I’d never felt so much like flesh before, like I was all body and no psyche. But you know what? I didn’t mind. There was some comfort to how completely basic it was. I mean all I had to do was survive — to stay alive and to keep the baby alive. And in that case, a shower felt like a triumph. One hand-written thank you note was like a dissertation. Producing five milliliters of breast milk was like curing cancer. If there’s one thing I learned from my postpartum quarantine, it was how to lower expectations.

So, when late last March, I got a postcard from my city government telling me to hunker down, I didn’t freak out. I plopped myself down on the couch with my laptop and my coffee and a notepad and I tried to just survive. I had a two year old by then. We were stuck at home together again, often with him sitting on my lap during Zoom meetings, waving at my colleagues and putting his sticky fingers all over the screen. This is before we were wearing masks, when touching our faces was sure to make us sick. At night, I’d often fall asleep with him on the floor and he’d literally sleep with his little toddler hands cupping my face, sometimes with a whole finger perched on my lip like a cigarette.

Some days it was a struggle to get a single email out. Many days it felt like time was standing still. But he started quarantine in diapers and after a few months at home, he could somehow use the toilet. He started quarantine with a vocabulary of about 30 words that I had written down in a list on the fridge: ball, hat, dog, nose, mouth, moon, milk. But soon I couldn’t keep up with the list, and words became phrases, and a year later he can communicate about anything he wants to.

We all know how fast babies grow, but I might have grown even faster during the first few weeks of his life. His brain was growing like 1% a day or whatever, but I was outgrowing the skin of who I thought I was every single day. I was increasing my capacity for patience at an exceptional rate. I was skipping grades in unconditional love. And I was passing even the most advanced sleep deprivation tests with flying colors.

This past year was another chance to let my most primal self shine, to rely on my intuition, to thrive because not thriving isn’t an option. We cried a lot. We snuggled a lot. We threw things at each other. He bit me a lot, and I even bit him once. We drove each other crazy. But, oh my god, how we grew. We lowered our expectations down to the ground and then celebrated over-the-top when we exceeded them. We lived. We loved. We wiped. And we didn’t run out of anything.

March 2021.