some of us have heard first forty daysThis book details the nourishment and care that new mothers should receive after giving birth as they learn to become mothers. This can be seen as a form of resistance to social pressure to “rebound” after childbirth. There’s a lot of wisdom here, although for many moms, well-prepared meals—and perhaps more importantly, other—prescribed meals can be hard to come by. After my two children were born, my well-intentioned herbal bidet fell out of use and sat in the bathroom cabinet for over a year before being tossed in the trash. It took me longer than that to “recover.” In fact, the concept of “rebounding”—going back to my old body, my old self—was a lie to me. I experienced a different kind of re-emergence into the world, although for me it was not days or months, but years.
Sometime a few days after my husband and daughter were born, he encouraged me to take a walk around the block. He suggested I go alone, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from my several-week-old baby, so I decided to take her with me. I can still see her tiny body, swaddled in swaddling clothes, floating in the center of the giant bassinet in the stroller that someone gave us as a gift at the baby shower. (I was still new to the parenting journey and didn’t yet know how to use the Bjorn wrap we bought, nor had I discovered the many benefits of a carrier.) The light outside felt incredibly bright and the sound was too loud. Maybe Gia agreed, because after a few minutes, she started crying and I rushed home with her. We went on many more successful walks over the following months and years, but a part of me remained closed off to her, unsure where exactly I belonged in the wider world. My dad has been living with cancer since before I was pregnant. The first time I went to see him with Gia, she was just two months old. He could eat again and vowed to be strong enough to hold her. That never happened. A few months after her first birthday, I went to a hospital in Ohio where he was scheduled to undergo a life-saving surgery to say goodbye. When the pandemic hit a few months later, I already felt as if I had stepped back into another realm.
In my metaphorical cave, I write as I learn how to be a mother, grieve my father, and try to process events in our shared world. The book I wrote later became exposure. I wrote about the multifaceted grief of losing a parent. I wrote about the intensity of new motherhood, about mothers, our desire for them, and how their presence and/or absence affects us throughout our lives. I think of my dear mother, who died the summer after I graduated from college, and whom I miss often. I’ve written about the power of female friendship. I write about artistic ambition, and a desire to be seen, even when I’m hiding. I know I’m still hungry inside, even though in order to find the courage to write this book, I often pretended it would never be read. I wrote about the pain of failure. I wrote about how I viewed the world in which I raised my children, a world of deep divisions and fractured nervous systems that left little room for the empathy that could heal us. I wrote an article about what things might look like from a different perspective. I write to make room for complexity. I write to achieve my own goals.
I continued to write during my second pregnancy with my son. After he was born, I had planned to abide by first forty daysresting at home and eating the right foods to heal my body, but when he was only a few days old, I went out to take Gia for a COVID test. She came back negative and we went to the playground. I felt the need to prove to her that I was still the same mom to minimize her anxiety about our separation after my brother’s arrival. I planned the meal delivery service my midwife recommended, even though it was outside our budget, so that for the first month I could feed the family grass-fed shepherd’s pie and chicken porridge a few times a week and we could all avoid cooking . It’s a luxury that I’m grateful for but many new moms don’t have. But that didn’t solve my depression. Every time I take my newborn son to the pediatrician’s office, I receive a mental health screening form for new mothers. I checked every box, which means No problem. Five out of five I’m fine. Part of me knows better, but deep down, I’m afraid that admitting that I’m struggling and overwhelmed means I’m failing at the most important job of all: motherhood. So I hid instead.
I said what I usually say when one of my daughter’s kindergarten moms, Kate, who also has a newborn Dominic, asked me how she was doing. “It’s tiring, but it’s good!”
“Really?” she asked. I nodded. “Because it’s hard for me,” she said, or something to that effect.
“Oh,” I replied. Faced with her honesty, I immediately relaxed my guard. “Yes. I know. This is.
So maybe there’s nothing wrong with me after all. Maybe was It’s just hard. Kate and I were joined by Marina, another new mother of two in kindergarten. We all lost our mothers. We were all able to be honest about our struggles. Their friendship became my lifeline – my first step back into the world. When I started working on Netflix Kate’s Office exposure Pumping my still-breastfeeding son in an empty conference room after preschool, another half-step.
All in all, it took me seven years to write this book while I was in the earliest stages of motherhood—my daughter is now six and my son is two and a half. Ultimately, it did work for me through grief and a lot of other things, and led me out of hiding places. This release made me feel vulnerable, but it’s a good kind of vulnerability, a necessary risk that comes with allowing other people’s work and myself to be seen. Now, to get ready for the book event, I’m finally changing out of my uniform of oversized hoodies and gym leggings, putting on lipstick and choosing clothes that fit my body better than I did before. I bought a pair of pink heels that I would never go there with kids. It felt like a re-emergence, a ritual sign to end my long postpartum period. Of course, the focus wasn’t on the clothes or the shoes, but on being able to step out again and get married to who I was, who I was, and who I was. and author.
Ava Deira is the author of the critically acclaimed YA novels “Finding Us” and “Love Letters to the Dead,” which were named best books of the year by Apple, Google, BuzzFeed, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library, and were recently Best book of the year. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she was a Truman Capote Fellow) and the University of Chicago. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and now lives in Altadena, California with her husband and two young children.
