In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. This month, she asked you what your parenthood has revealed to you about yourself, in all authenticity? The ‘News from you’ section provides an overview of your responses.
I have been “in therapy” for several years, unpacking my little bag of thoughts every week, sharing out loud this story of myself that I build, rebuild, patch up, tirelessly.
This story of me obviously begins long before me. Entangled in the stories of others, parents, grandparents, the story of the origins that we trace back to where we manage to unwind it.
How to live ? Tirelessly, how to live? A great suffering, a great tear; how to live when you are sad in a good-natured society? How to live when you are touched, overwhelmed by plants, animals, looks, and yet you have to move forward, function, have fun.
THE fun was hard to reach. I cleaned up my story with my psychoanalyst. On the phone since the pandemic. I talk, I talk, I talk. I clean. I put in order. I start again. I dive back. I hold my breath. I come back to the surface. I get back on my feet. I lose my footing. I dive back. Maybe that’s living.
But one day, quite old, in 2021, in April. A positive pregnancy test. A little dizziness, a little nausea. Not at all sure what’s coming. I started therapy at 21, telling myself that when I had children, I would have put the foundations of my tottering house in order. I didn’t know if they would hold up in 2021.
The pregnancy passed like a dream. Complete abstraction. When you don’t inhabit your body very much and you lodge entirely in your head, your belly which stretches out, it remains abstract. I went through the whole pregnancy process in a birthing centre, where I experienced a significant first revelation; my body exists, is fit, powerful, complete, capable.
On the day of delivery, I had COVID. I was two weeks post term. Omicron was everywhere, the panic of December 2021, the overflowing emergencies. A terrible delivery, under Pitocin, emergency cesarean section. The humanity glimpsed had been replaced by technique, efficiency, the sterile cleanliness of medicines. In a few days I lived there in states that I could describe in an entire novel.
But in short, what matters is the aftermath. It’s here encounter. I did not know my daughter. She arrived. I met her. Huge eyes. A mauve body, wrinkled, writhing. A glance. And the release of hormones; I’m sure none trip no drugs can counter the power of this encounter in its eternity; the body, the infinite, vertigo, the living.
I got closer to the animal part in us. It’s the most hackneyed cliché, but it helps me live now. We are alive, connected to others, to the stars, to the big and the tiny, at all times. The Meaning that I was so lacking, suddenly, is filled and overflowing, almost reluctantly. I know it’s not very feminist to say it, and I had a little trouble admitting it because of my family history, but giving birth to a human being has completely fulfilled me.
My daughter is one year old, maybe things will change. Already, I feel that the intensity of the experience is beginning to weaken, I am jealous of my first memories, I dwell on the details as one does of a love story. But for now, I enjoy a bottomless happiness that makes me lose my footing. At night, I wake up and breathe my baby’s breath and feel dizzy. Time is different, with a completely different texture.
I think of her at 1 day, at 1 month, at 1 year, at 15 years old. I think and capsize with happiness thinking of uninterrupted life, of the cycle of things. It’s as if all of a sudden, I had enlightenments like a happy fool. Everything seems so ridiculous, absurd, offbeat; armed conflicts, hatreds, butcheries. How is this possible when the birth of every being on this earth stems from the same miracle? Planetarium vertigo. A vertigo of the unspeakable smallness that constitutes us, and of its irreducible immensity.
I have the feeling of having been brought into the world by the birth of my daughter. This coincided with several things; a lover, a family, a home, a slightly less poignant sadness; the life that has done its work. I like to think that this Copernican revolution that I experienced, it is shared by so many beings. Rather than being appalled by the incredible banality of what I’m going through, I’m amazed, dazzled, blown away. I wanted so much to be like everyone else, now I belong to the race of my fellows. I am registered in the line, I continued it gently.
Pauline is sleeping right now. I can’t wean her at night. My nights are terrible. Three of us sleep in the bed, with the dog and the cat fighting over the blankets. I arrive surrounded at work, I have brain fog coming out of my ears. Every Tuesday, my litanies continue on the phone with my psychoanalyst. Admission to the CPE was catastrophic. I’m afraid of being in fusion with my Pau. I am afraid of reproducing things from which I have sought to free myself. I am often paralyzed by the fear of ruining everything. And yet, and yet.
I continue to breastfeed even though everyone is judging me. I continue the co-sleeping thanks to groups on Facebook where I find comfort and solidarity. I exchange with friends, older women, my mother, women without children. I think out loud with everyone, I question, grope, hesitate, trust. I realize that there is no guide. I write my role above all through the love that overflows me from edge to edge, the discharges of love that continue to overwhelm me, that give me the desire to have other children to pursue this immense trip of fun and love.
I am well aware of all that they wanted us to believe; ambition, competition, growth, profit… I feel it in my body that these words do not cover anything that makes up life. Life is certainly elsewhere. In the breath, in the link, in the resumption of everyday gestures, in the care, in the presence, in the discharges of hormones, of love, of laughter, of tears. In sadness too, which isn’t so bad after all.