When I Get Back

On new motherhood, a body that doesn't feel like mine, and the woman I'm still moving toward.

For nine months, I shared my body with someone. He took up space in a way I could feel — first as a flutter, then as weight, then as the particular shape of a heel pressed into my right side. Now he’s three feet away in a bassinet, and I’m still adjusting to the absence of him inside me. The strange lightness. The body that is somehow mine again and not mine at all.

He left a vacancy. So did the version of me who existed before him.

I don’t know who I am in this current moment. When I speak to my son I call myself momma. I felt sure of who I was before but now there’s a stroller in the way of my tennis bag, my body ached when I tried to pull a weed, I am not sure what I even like to eat anymore, and I am still grieving missing my best friend’s wedding. I cry to my husband and tell him I need something more but I can’t name it.

I don’t recognize the person in the mirror. I put on makeup to try to feel more like myself but again I feel like I don’t know her at all. My closet is full of clothes that don’t fit me. When I try something on, my stomach turns. At night I speed walk past the mirror in my nursing bra so I don’t spend my first moments in bed obsessing over what I saw. I want to crawl from beneath this loose skin.

Once I can really move again, I am sure I will feel better. When I can be active, my body will feel mine again. I day dream about a body that I recognize and am disgusted at my vanity. I look at my son. My soft body is responsible for this precious life. I try to give myself grace, it rarely comes.

When I make plans for the summer I wonder who I will be when I get there. I wonder what parts of my old self remain and who will fill the overwhelming vacancies. My identity exists in the future tense. Am I fun-loving or high strung? Will I love to travel the way that I used to? Will my husband love having me around the way he used to?

I close my eyes and picture a young mother with her beautiful baby boy strapped to her chest. A ball cap, a dress, sneakers, dancing and pointing at daddy on stage. Is she me? When I get there, will I know her?