skullcap & peanut butter.

field notes from inside the cocoon.

The days were rough and it's all quite dim
But my mind cuts through it all
Like a wrecking ball

—Gillian Welch

You didn’t dance yourself out the womb. You came in like a wrecking ball, busted through me and into this world and smashed any sense of normalcy to pieces. Life as we know it has fallen apart entirely. When I say entirely, I mean the texture of life has changed. The structure of a day has evaporated. Time becomes elastic, it stretches and thins in previously impossible ways. My body and mind are foreign. The house feels strange and new. Martians dropped onto a different planet. We straddle two worlds. We hover above the ground, we get dragged underneath it like quicksand. How fitting, then, to gaze outside and see a ravaged patio, flooded with remnants of the storm that swung through the night before you were born. The outside looks like our insides, littered with rocks and branches, shattered pots, the plants they held, swaths of mud coating the ground and walls. Good, the landscape matches the magnitude of your arrival. You are an earthquake. Glorious and devastating. How bizarre to look out and see FedEx trucks making deliveries, people going on runs, the world carrying on with its silly little tasks, despite the fact that you are here now and everything is different. Why are they still delivering mail? Hasn’t anyone heard? Adeline is here.

You scream for hours at night. Who can blame you. You are new here, and the world is the world. I bounce you on the gray birth ball, sweating profusely, still bleeding and bruised. I like the aches. My pain is the trophy I was promised I wouldn’t get. I dig deep wells of patience. I clutch your small body firmly to mine, sing Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey album from start to finish, every single night. Sometimes I riff and sing “Row Jimmy,” by the Dead and I think about my dad. Rock yer baby, to and fro/not too fast and not too slow. This is what works. I find myself somehow enjoying these marathons.

I try to Sleep When The Baby Sleeps, but I find this to be impossible. So tired, I’m wired. Too exhausted for sleep, I am wrapped in a kind of feral hypervigilance. I lie next to you and stare at the ceiling. I listen to you breathe, listening the way that a deer listens with its skin. Listening for more than just sound. This somatic intelligence is a gift of new motherhood. You rustle in your bassinet. Your sleepy newborn startles are almost identical to the inner kneading and turnings that I felt when you lived inside me. The familiar cadence is comforting. The echo of you still hangs in the vacancy of my belly. I can almost remember.

I try to hypnotize myself with dumb affirmations; say to myself, over and over,“it is safe for me to relax into the comfort of sleep.” I get up and take big dropperfuls of skullcap tincture, right under my tongue, I hold it there til it burns. I follow it with big gobs of poorly mixed peanut butter, oily and eaten directly off the spoon. This is the magic 2AM recipe; the only thing that permits me to sleep. I stand in my dark kitchen, the soft outline of my body buzzing, aching. A fleeting moment of aloneness, a thick silence. Try to swallow this.

My mother and grandmother come, they vacuum my house and take the dog out and cook the vegetables that are about to go bad in the fridge. They look on while my boobs spray milk uncontrollably all over the living room and drench my orange dress. My Grandma tells us about an old song called “Sweet Adeline.” Do you mean Sweet Caroline? I ask stupidly. No. Adeline. We put it on and I sob some more. Claudia makes me chicken soup and changes my sheets and cleanses the birth space in her Claudia way. William makes me laugh, thank god. My dad comes for my birthday and makes an honest attempt at a curry recipe I ask him to cook. We watch Goodfellas and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Always Sunny while you sleep beside me and I feel light, like I am 19 again. We stand outside and talk about nothing; him, chain smoking Marlboros and me, standing six feet upwind from him, holding the baby. Claudia and Joe get me a vanilla fruit cake from the Korean bakery and I drink a beer. Hannah stays for an entire week and cooks me blueberry oat cakes, Italian sausage soup, decadent chocolate peanut butter granola. She roasts peppers, sets my oven on fire, gives me massages, sits with me quietly, soothes my baby like a magician. Jamie stops over and graciously—wordlessly— starts cooking me rice cake soup, hands me a Kindle with a Haruki Murakami book downloaded onto it, listens to my birth story. Aunt Linda checks on me every single week.

You curl up on my chest and nap for hours, skin to skin. It is so quiet. Everything is so quiet. The weight of you is trust. Is everything. You drape me in love, which cuts through the dull numbness. Little layered sighs. The warmest & tiniest quilt. I want to bottle this. I also want to get in my truck and drive far away from this, maybe forever, or maybe just for an hour. I drink coffee and it tastes like normalcy. A hot shower is heaven. I google therapists while babywearing while sitting on the toilet. I try to eat using chopsticks left-handed and drop fried rice on your head. I wear Joe’s Gibb’s Bagels shirt and my maternity sweats almost every day. I cry while nursing. I cry using the peri bottle. I cry rubbing shea butter on my mushy belly. I cry making myself the chamomile rose tea that Steph sent me. I cry swaying you to sleep, hot tears falling on your face as I murmur oiloveyouoiloveyouoiloveyouprettyaddie, over and over into your hair. I marvel that I still have tears left. Whatever this is, it must be the opposite of surrender. New voice message: “The unknown is currently swallowing me up and spitting me back out as something else, please call again later.” I stare out at the garish sunshine. I watch the neighbors paint their purple shutters pink. I watch the top pink shutter fall off. I watch them paint them black.

Caterpillars don’t just turn into butterflies, they liquefy into a sticky, slow nothingness before reconstructing themselves. They wait. I am certain, though, that I will get stuck in this in-between place. Never transforming, I will remain a vicious goo, caught in the capsule of transformation forever. I am gripped by the fear of this possibility. I wonder how long I am supposed to wait. I pray to my childhood god with the earnestness of my 7-year-old self: help me cross over. My body dissolves itself into milk. My brain bushwhacks new pathways. My bones creak. My heart bursts. I wait. Metamorphose into a maternal vessel.

When I think of this time, I think of the unsettling sunshine, of uncomfortable stillness, of unbearable heat and slow love and big grief and shattered patio pots.

I think of Gillian Welch, of salt and blood.

I think of a caterpillar evanescing, waiting.

When I think of the early days, I taste skullcap and peanut butter.

I can almost remember.