The Fourth Trimester

By: Lizzie Joy (loveland) Nunemaker

Wednesday October 26, 2022 12:54PM

I have exactly one hour and six minutes to write this before I leave to pick my three-and-a-half month son up from my mother-in-law’s; it’s been almost four months since I’ve opened this laptop, and I have a lot to say.

We are going to skip the part about how at a thirty-four week ultrasound I was told that my infant son had a “mass” on or near his spine, and that it was probably cancer. We are going to skip the story about the potential cancer, the nearly month stay in the NICU working with oncologists, because my “fourth trimester” didn’t seem to start until I knew my son was going to live, days after he turned one-month-old, when we received a call that the tumor on his spine was benign, and the real clock of our lives started.

I will admit that I had a particularly naive understanding of what having a baby would be like. When I had the thrill of two positive pink lines on the test stick I didn’t know that the next nine months would be a daily roulette spin of physical ailments of various kinds. I didn’t know that the nausea and vomiting would be continuous, the back pain would leave my once lithe dancer body crippled and limping, or that I would lose acres of sleep due to acid reflux all night that I’d taste in my nose and throat for days after. I didn’t know that the only exercise I’d be able to do would be water aerobics with my beloved old biddies that used walkers and canes to get to the pool. By second trimester, I was ready to be done, and by third, I felt like Eve’s curse was striking me with cruel and unnecessary force. 

Sudden pre-eclampsia and his tumor warranted an ambulatory procession to Riley’s Children’s Hospital three-and-a-half hours away. And at thirty-seven weeks, the induction didn’t take: my baby’s heart rate dropped and all of a sudden ten doctors were in the room having me consent to an emergency c-section.

When you are in agony, it is always the worst agony, no matter what you’ve gone through before. When I was convulsing on a metal operating table, I was, through chattering teeth, chanting prayers in tongues, because some prayers are too fearful and holy, and words cannot be uttered. The pain seemed to last and last even though it took thirty minutes to my son being born and me finally passing out from exhaustion.

Post-surgery my stomach hangs down, a bulge I’m not used to, and the scar feels like a perforated line “tear here” as a purple raised entry-point guide for the next C-section, if there is one. It typically takes on the indentations of whatever elastic waistband I am wearing, and the skin– two inches of it– feel completely numb to the touch, so that my finger feels the ridges and indentations of the elastic imprint, but my abdomen feels like when you walk into a room and have forgotten why you’re there. It’s as if my abdomen doesn’t know it belongs to me, but to be fair, a lot of the time I do not feel like I belong to it.

Even though I’d claim to be free from the youth that was once plagued with body dysmorphia and eating disorders, in its current state, my body isn’t recognizable to me. Yesterday I accidentally saw myself in a very unflattering full-length mirror and was stunned to realize that the greasy-haired woman was me. I had the silhouette of a stout man with a beer gut wearing a lawn-sized trash bag as a dress. (I said it was unflattering). And all the weight that was put on during the first three trimesters, are now piles of sandbags, my knees and spine buckling under the weight. You could run your finger down the ridgepole of my abdomen where the diastasis recti have separated with seemingly irreconcilable differences. I’m sad to admit that I strained my back during water aerobics with my geriatric compatriots because my back is taking on all the work with no abdominal muscles to assist.

Thirty minutes in and I’ve only spoken about my broken and unknowable body, but if it was just my body, I’d be fine, happy, even.

We came home from the NICU and we were told our son would live. Other moms make being a mother look natural and uncomplicated. But my nerves are now like trip-wires, and even though I’m already a high-strung individual, every curdling scream he made, every sound in the middle of the night was a tiny explosion in my brain. 

I’m trying to think of analogies to describe what real panic is like: you find out your significant other is cheating, or you’re caught in a lie, or the red and blue lights are in your rear view mirror telling you to pull over. It felt like that except constant. And my baby was not comforted by me, I would hold him and he would just scream. I would feel terror and sadness all at once. And I never could fall back asleep, I’d stay wide eyed waiting for the sirens to wail again because in my head they were already wailing. They call it “postpartum anxiety,” but I just call it “war.”

I’m a thirty-year old intellectual with two master’s degrees, I’ve hiked five-hundred miles alone on the Appalachian trail, and overcome many unspoken traumas. But this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s almost infuriatingly simple. I mean all I had to do was take care of a baby. It doesn’t take any fierce mental gymnastics to do that, it all allegedly came from this sacral space– the survival instinct– something guttural and prowling and gentle and wise. And for all my higher learning I felt completely out of depth. I lamented that I couldn’t just set him down without him screaming. I envisioned that he would take long, restful naps in my lap, (like my cat) while I typed. I had half a book done and I oh-so-naively estimated that it would be done by this December. Reality has set in: it’s almost November and I still have twelve chapters to go.

It’s gotten better by thick margins since he turned three months old and started sleeping seven to eight hours a night. And since becoming a mom I feel I’ve been inducted into some kind of secret sorority of moms who are all somehow more eligible to be my friends now that we can pass knowing nods over our children’s shrill cries. Motherhood is something so common that we are somehow desensitized to how unfathomable it actually is. And people would talk about the sheer delight of babyhood and how, those older than I, how they wished they could “go back in time and re-experience” and I just wanted to be out of the anxiety and struggle of those early sleepless weeks. But memory is kind, and I’m sure one day I’ll look back at the images of how incredibly precious my son is and I’ll wish the same thing. But I am here to write about the truth, without the lavender glow of nostalgia, and the truth is that the fourth trimester is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and mothers are truly in their own class of fortitude. 

It’s 1:49PM and I have exactly eleven minutes to edit before I pickup my son. One day I will have more time but for now this is what I’m given.