making it through

I'm borrowing from my dear friend Jackie's reflection on new motherhood to expand with my own experience.

I've made it through pregnancy, birth, and the newborn stage twice now, and I could not ever put into words how I did it. It's been the same range of feelings for all three experiences.

It's exhausting and pushes me to the very end of what I ever thought I could ever endure, but somehow I find the strength to continue on. I reach the point where I am absolutely certain I, and the entire world, cannot possibly continue to exist past this moment. But there is no turning back from where I am right now, and I do continue to live and breathe and exist in this moment, and the next. And the next.

And then, there is a moment of complete and total surrender and defeat. And in the next moment, before I've even noticed, I'm done. And somehow it was the easiest and most natural thing I've ever done, and I begin to forget that I ever reached that point of defeat. There is just the moment in which I realize what I've done, and I just cannot wrap my mind around it.

And then I begin to miss it. And I reflect and decide what I'll do different and better next time, even though I did everything right the first time around. And I gain so much confidence from the delusion that what I just did was a simple task, that I know I'm cut out for this life.

Until I go through it all again.

I'm just getting to and through the point in Elliot's infancy where I don't see how any of us will exist a second, a day, a year from now. I am so focused on what is happening right now - is she going to be hungry soon? Is she breathing? Is her heart beating? Is mine? - that my brain is absolutely not capable of thinking about the future. I wonder sometimes if I'll wake up still pregnant, or if I'll wake up in the maternity ward, or if I'll wake up and she is still an angry-faced little wretch trying to figure out just how to be alive.

I sit here now with a sleeping infant on my chest, unsure how I am surviving on 4 hours of sleep per night, unable to believe I was getting by on 2 just a few months ago. Or how I ever felt tired after a full 8. Or 10. Or 12.

I wonder how she ever learned to smile. I don't remember the first time she did it, although I'm sure I wrote it down somewhere. Every time seems like the first time, and yet it seems like she's always done it. Just as it seems she just arrived, yet I cannot imagine, or sometimes even remember, life before she came along.

I find it hard to believe that Evan was ever an only child, that he ever reacted to news of my pregnancy with uncertainty, that he ever told me it was a bad idea to have another baby. I think in the same way as I do, he feels she has always been here.

And in this moment of bleary-eyed clarity, before my mind slips back into autonomy and does not re-emerge to think of anything but survival for quite a while, it is in this moment that I am happiest. This is when I know that life really is easy, because I'm making it through without even trying.

This is when I know life is good.