Feeling into the passage of time
Part 2: In celebration of Nora's one-month milestone, I return to the day she was born.
June 12th marked one month since our little Nora came into our life. And already, time feels to be slipping away. Last week and as a start to this series, I reflected on how much I don’t want to forget these early days, which is why I’ve set out to write about it here.
I’ve learned a lot about the nature of memory working on my memoir. In trying to go back and trace past experiences, I’ve seen just how often I was cut off emotionally from what I was experiencing at the time—and thus, many of my memories now live only inside my head, like simple moving pictures with little to no connection to my body and how I might have felt at the time. I sometimes can’t even tell if a memory is truly a memory or a movie my mind created as a result of imagining the past based on a story I’ve told myself or someone else has told me.
This has made for difficult memoir writing. It’s not enough to just describe—or as we say in writing circles, tell. Words, to really land in a real way, must carry the weight of emotion not just be an outline; they have to show.
Cue listening to music to trigger feeling, mindfulness exercises to pair with my writing practice, therapy sessions to help dislodge the truth from my body and write as true story I could: one compelled by the heart rather than mere mind; one driven by compassion, not ego.
When setting out to write about my postpartum experience, it’s been a similar struggle. Having a baby is such a BIG experience—how could words ever do it justice? And with each passing day, memories of those early experiences grow fainter and fainter, exacerbated by hormonal shifts and sleep deprivation. It’s hard to keep hold of them.
Writing my “birth story”
In my second week postpartum, I really struggled with my mental health. My hormones were off the charts and I found myself falling into emotional spirals on a daily basis (I’ll write more about this later). But that initial storm has, in significant part, passed now. I feel more confident. I’ve spent the last four weeks bonding with my little girl and learning so much about her—and myself. We’ve been a team the whole way through and right now, for her one month birthday, we’re slapping high-fives. We did it!
But it’s still hard, if not impossible, to put it all into words. But being a writer, I have to start somewhere.
I think about my “birth story” and walk myself through each hour of that day, May 11th—Mother’s Day, of all days—when I went into labour. I start to write it down, into a timeline, to get things straight.
12:35 am | My waters break while in bed.
5:00 am | I wake up after a groggy, Gravol-induced sleep. I call my midwife.
7:00 am | Jason puts the finishing touches on the hospital bag.
9:00 am | We go “curb walking” along Sofia Street hoping to induce contractions.
1:30 pm | I finally feel something, but it’s slight. Jason goes to Shoppers to buy pads.
5:00 pm | We walk up Main Street. I am eating a DQ dipped cone. Contractions are getting closer but still not regular nor super intense.
7:00 pm | I go in for a non-stress test to see whether we might need to induce.
9:00 pm | I return home having decided to wait it out. Within an hour, I can’t speak through my contractions.
10:00 pm | I am in active labour.
11: 45 pm | I measure 4 cm dilation and am admitted upstairs into a birthing suite.
11: 55 pm | I am submerged into a bath where I dilate the next 6 cm.
1:45 am | I begin pushing.
2:01 am | Our baby girl is born.
But like appointments in a calendar, these entries read so hollow—they are but sinews in the full body of the experience, a failed grasping at the marrow of something so much more alive than these pithy time stamps present.
I need to find more words.