The opening that never closes

The psychedelic vulnerability of postpartum

A dear friend of mine had a baby last week. It was a privilege to receive updates as we awaited news of the arrival. And a wonder to see the first pictures of her little one, so new in this world.

It has also been fascinating to watch how, just for having touched the portal of birth, I’m brought right back to those early days.

It’s been a year and a half since I gave birth to my own daughter, and I’m still making sense of the tender, thin, vulnerable, expansive, exposed and profoundly psychedelic experience that is the transition to motherhood.

Being freshly postpartum is a state unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

Looking back, I don’t see so much as feel that time.

The watercolor of intense joy and fear. The pouring of my entire self, willingly, into the ocean of this arrival.

The incredible, terrible, realization that I loved something literally more than life itself. And yet this thing would have its own experience of life in the world. An experience I had no more control over than a flower controls the wind.

I was open, in every sense of the word.

Open to every feeling. Open to every sound. Open to every sensation, cry, intuition. Open to every thought. Open to every hint of change. Open to every wind that moved through the house.

I remember friends recommending shows to watch during the long hours of lying in bed while the baby slept. I could barely get through them. One hint of loss or sadness or despair, and it felt as if a great chasm was opening in my life as well.

Some days the openness felt like a passport into the true nature of reality, something I cherished more than anything.

Other days, I couldn’t bear it. The openness felt like exposure in a world where I would never be able to hold all the preciousness that needed shelter.

I decided to reread all the Harry Potters, which have always been like childhood comfort food to me. But I sobbed my way through the entire first book, never realizing how piercingly sad Harry’s own story of loss is. The mother standing in front of a crib, offering her life to save her child’s. The mother, giving her body up entirely and without thought, on the hope of preserving this body that was born from her own. It still makes me cry.

Because this is the reality of being postpartum. One I’m still grappling with.

It’s not a state that comes and then is gone. It’s the beginning of a phase change in your life. A liminal, initiatory, permanent threshold over which you step and become someone else. A door that opens and never closes.

The intense swell of hormones may come and go, but, in the truest sense of the word, you are postpartum for the rest of your life.

Having a child creates an opening—to life, to loss, to love, to the desperate, primal, essential need to trust that which holds us all.

And so I wonder, as I gaze at newborn pictures and remember the life-altering openness of those early days, if I will feel this way forever.

If I will hear tidings of births and always be brought back to the great tenderness of those first days. Of being on my knees in an open meadow. Of having no clothes on in the wind. Of holding something in my arms that can’t survive on its own. And of knowing that my entire job—in love, unclothed, and exposed—is to help this being to be ready, one day, to go.

I wonder if what was opened then, was never meant to close. Like a head of sunflower seeds, ready to break into the soil.

And I think, maybe, this is what seeds the new beginning.

Mothers being willing to embrace that openness and not look away.

To welcoming the vulnerability, the breaking, the unfinishedness, the not knowing.

The tenderness of loving, with the entirety of your being.

Of being open to it all.

Because when we embrace this openness, we become seed heads, giving ourselves willingly, bending away from the life we knew.

We break open—and there are a thousand new beginnings in the soil.

.

After writing this week’s Substack I decided to go back and look at what I was writing when I was post-partum. One of the first entries after the birth was entitled “everything.” It was a couple weeks after I got home from the hospital and I had tried, in a few fleeting minutes, to capture the overwhelming feeling of everything I had been experiencing.

It’s rough, loose, and half formed, but that’s so much of what those early days feel like.

I thought I’d share it here as a gesture toward the attempt at trying to capture the uncapturable.