My Day Begins Last Night
My day begins last night.
This is what is so complicated to explain about my life as a breastfeeding superconductor and sustained-proximity mother who has been birthing and breastfeeding everyday for the last 400 weeks and counting. My labors don’t stop and start. There is no true off time. My mothering realities flow more like the ocean. There are high tides and low tides, but movement all the same.
METANARRATIVE
I have been trying to find the words to describe what my life is like in the day-to-day sense. These are the first few lines of what might become an essay, or a chapter in a book, or the opening lines of a documentary film scene. I don’t yet know what it will be, if anything beyond something I unpack in the loving witness of the Garden, but when the poetic and extremely accurate words emerged today, I thought to record them in my phone. Then I came here to try to extend those few lines into the full vision, but it faltered. The drafting for this piece is not meant to be on the computer. It, like most of my stories, is a long labor that will reveal itself to me in the midst of my labors as Mother Mother. I have to wait for it, like almost everything precious that is born.
After years of attempting to explain to various people how it is I “function” without a “full night’s rest,” these are the words that finally came, My day begins last night. Ever since becoming a mother I have been living in this alternate rhythm of time as a breastfeeding superconductor. I have not had the language to fully convey that my whole experience of time, of awake and asleep, of rest and energy, has been radically reimagined and primarily shaped by a devotion to labors that are not widely celebrated or understood in the world around me, or even by the people in my family. The inability to thoroughly describe the relevance of your labors, adds layers of loneliness and invisibility to the mothering labors. This too has left its marks on the landscape that is my motherhood.
Trying to paint a picture of my day is bringing up all the other things I have to flesh out first so that the story has roots. Defining breastfeeding on demand. Defining breastfeeding. Defining breastfeeding superconductor. Unpacking the many factors of breastfeeding through the night. Detailing the logistics of sleeping in the bed with my children every night. Talking about nursing while pregnant, and tandem nursing, and tandem nursing while pregnant. Opening up about not sharing a bed or a room with my co-creator. Going into the complex truths of why I am a solo-night-mothering laborer even though I live in the same house with my children’s father. It’s a lot to unravel, and so much of it is entangled in tender, still-raw, still-healing parts of the journey. I am only just now arriving to a space where I think I can speak the truth with love.
This is very important for me. There have been so many wounds along the way in this calling to regenerate the sacred nourishment codes of humanity—this is my new language for “breastfeeding”—which is extremely simplistic and not at all vast enough to express the majesty of my labors. But I don’t want to write from the wounds, from the hurt, from the anger and frustration that comes with being unseen, unheard, unacknowledged. I am sitting with the possibilities of love to soften and bring a warm, bright illumination to the heart-story that I am really wanting to tell. This opening line, My day begins last night, feels like a movement in that direction. I am going to plant it like a seed and water it with the prayers that an expanding loving consciousness is the most gentle, and generative, way into the story that wants to be born.
Have you written a poem today? There are so many lovely prompts on our NaPoWriMo Adventure Board! Happy writing!