“Nostalgia, at its core, is the disbelief that time passes. Like doubt, it operates like a tic. It can be compulsive. Once it possesses you, it usually leaves you more human.
June is the month of nostalgia. You, too, do not always believe that time passes evenly. You cling onto the past like an orifice. There’s pleasure in a past reinvented. This pleasure is always sour sweet and cringing because the past can’t really be changed, just misremembered.”
—Alice Sparkly Kat
Everyone warns you that time flies when you are about to become a parent.
You think you understand what they mean. But you don’t.
Saying, “It’s crazy! She’s growing so fast!” is a clichéd understatement, and yet it is the only trite phrase I manage to eke out to friends, family members, and the checkout person at Trader Joe’s who is, rightfully, swooning over my baby. I recall meeting a father, walking with his teenage daughter, on the trail several months ago. He smiled at me carrying my then-2-month-old in the sling and said, “Don’t blink!”
I blinked, and now it is June again. Today, actually, was my due date. This time last year, I was enormous. We had just moved, and I was nesting, resting, anticipating. Ferrying a watermelon-sized belly around through the thick, oppressive heat of the Mid-Atlantic resulted in a special headiness that had me moving through my days with a slow, measured pace and a kind of hypnotic mindset. “Excited,” isn’t the word for it.
I was right on the cusp of something momentous; it was palpable, and it felt as though I was living in a potent glow of calm expectation that belonged only to me.
Then, the last week of my pregnancy, the shimmery bubble I was living in popped. My midwife failed to communicate her vacation dates with me, and my perfectly scaffolded plans were starting to come apart. I spent the last week of my pregnancy feeling distraught, angry, and helpless. I hardly have any photos from the last week— I have been searching for one of the only ones that I do have— a faraway, hazy shot of me sunning myself on my patio, taken through a leafy frame —to share with you. I can’t find it. Re-experiencing this time of year, almost exactly one year later, has brought up remarkably visceral feelings that catch in my throat and take me off guard. The sensation of late spring sun on my skin, the way the air smells like certain flowers that I cannot name, the now-familiar local birdsongs— commonplace punches to the gut. The body remembers. I walk by the bench I sat on when I talked to my grandma mere days before going into labor, I find a mason jar lid labelled “BONE BROTH 4/23/22,” and start crying. Stumbling upon a digital copy of, “Berlin Krebs Birth Decisions In Case of Hospital Transfer,” the way the house feels with the windows open, the blueberry lemon seltzer I bought the week she was born, which has found it’s way into my fridge again; seeing my home birth kit on the shelf. Weeping.
Is it just me who experiences this strange, nostalgic sadness? Is it because I am, and always will be a big, sappy feeler? Is it the lingering dregs of depression? Is it the surprise nature of my pregnancy that I am still processing? Perhaps it is because we decided to undergo every major life shift during the nine months that I was pregnant. Maybe it’s just the simple fact that this was a huge experience. Maybe it is all of the above.
This time last year, I was almost 60lb heavier.
This time last year, my dog was alive.
This time last year, I was my daughter’s only home.
This time last year was, “any day now.”
This time last year, I was so sure.
This time last year, I had no idea.
I miss the anticipation. I miss the sense of orderliness that I felt during my pregnancy, but I also miss the great, expansive swell that comes with living each day with something secret and hidden. I miss feeling life growing inside of me, of being a vessel. I miss taking such impeccably good care of myself. In a selfish way, I miss when she was only mine. I miss operating under the illusion of predictability. I miss the glow.
All of those truths exist alongside these: I am entranced by the way my daughter grows and changes week to week. I am completely starstruck by her. She is my best friend and my greatest teacher. I am so proud of her, of us. I miss Order—but honestly, I like Chaos, too. I really like all of the ways in which I have changed.
This past year has turned me inside out, stretched me (literally and metaphorically) in every which way. I’ve been drawn and quartered by it. I am still coated in the residue of it. I have loved it and despised it. I have resisted it with all my might and surrendered to it entirely. It has emptied me out until I was just a shell, and it has filled me to the brim. It has challenged my beliefs, sparked unexpected passions, awoken me to my creativity in many different ways.
I have whiplash from it, honestly.
I am dumbfounded, I am honored, I am humbled— and I am still looking over my shoulder, trying to understand what the hell just happened.
Inexplicably mourning something that I did not lose.
Still grieving something that was never mine to keep.
Took daughter to a bluegrass festival, camped for 4 nights and we all slept the best we have in months, so we will be sleeping in my backyard from now on!
This New Yorker threw her first crab feast for her Maryland-born husband’s birthday and is very proud of herself.
Good episode of the Unapologetically Unmedicated podcast on all of the physiologic changes that occur postpartum. Most interesting takeaway: it can take 5-7 years for a woman’s body to re-balance after having a child! It’s a quick 15 min listen.
Adeline has started handing me my glasses each morning, first thing when we wake up. It is unbearably cute.
If you like to nerd out on birth stuff, this is an excellent read on the history and risks of an active management approach to labor management by Dr. Marsden Wagner. "Many Western doctors hold the belief that we can improve everything, even natural childbirth in a healthy woman. This philosophy is the philosophy of people who think it deplorable that they were not consulted at the creation of Eve, because they would have done a better job" (Kloosterman 1994).
On a Neko Case kick rn