Eden Onpeng

I guess you can say I’m deep in the weeds. In the thick of it. Deeply hormonal, with a two-week-old newborn next to me. I am sleep-deprived. It’s all happening now and my attempts to form my experience into words result in incoherent ramblings (like this one).

I still feel like old me but also like new me, ready to be reinvented amid this new transition. Like Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White. Eden the Childless (Pre-Child? Child-Free? It all feels loaded) to Eden the Mother.

Physically I feel more alert and mobile now that I’m no longer pregnant. Recovering from a C-section while being newly postpartum and with a lingering cough from a cold really sucked. Every cough felt like knives stabbing my lower abdomen. I’ve lost 15 pounds, and although I weigh about 20 pounds heavier than I did before the pregnancy, I relish not bumping my belly into the stove burner control knobs while cooking.

But emotionally, I feel turbulent and unmoored. How is it that I feel like myself and yet not myself?

On one hand, gazing into my baby’s eyes while holding him and feeding him has been magical. I cry thinking about how fast he is already growing. He has outgrown the newborn-sized diapers and clothing, and fits into 3-month-sized clothes as a two-week-old baby. I listen to the sounds he makes. The soft coos. The angry cries. The fussy grunts. His little hands open and close around my finger as he looks up at the ceiling fan.

I see genetic echoes of my dead sister in the shape and shininess of his eyes and the shape of his cheeks. After all, she and I share 50% of our genes as siblings. It’s uncanny. It feels like my baby sister (circa 2003) is staring back at me with her eyes, but I know it is not her, and only genetic echoes of her reflected in my son, staring back at me.

It’s like when you are going about your day and you see someone who strongly resembles a long-dead loved one. You know they’re not them, but at the same time, it is uncanny, to see someone with those same or very-similar features moving about the world. I wonder if I resemble a dead loved one to someone else in the world. Maybe we all do.

On the other hand, I find myself feeling sensitive, paranoid of judgment from other people, about my life decisions, my capabilities as a new mother. I sweat as people watch me placate my baby. The act of changing a diaper in front of others (except my husband) has become a hands-on pop quiz on parenting skills 101.

This feeling of inadequacy extends beyond motherhood and into the realm of my creative pursuits. My creative bandwidth is limited now, of course. For the most part I do not mind it because I am trying to cherish the time I have with the baby. But I feel a deep sense of shame that I don’t have anything to show for all the work and enthusing I did for my failed projects – two unfinished novels that I no longer have interest in completing. I had written those under different mindsets that now feel foreign and far away to me. If my mind is always changing so much, am I really equipped for long-term projects like a novel? As of right now I don’t have a story to tell except my own, which is ongoing as long as I am alive. I also feel ashamed for feeling bad about this.

I know I should be resting when he is resting, but my mind is restless and hungry. My brain wants to consume something satisfying and juicy. Reddit feeds me headlines and bot-driven conversations of troubling global news–as a result, I look at my soft, swaddle-wrapped potato and dread the war he would would be called to fight when he comes of age.

These thoughts are heavy but I have been fortunate to have a husband who has been hands-on in being a new dad and sharing night shifts on feeding-diapering-sleeping our baby. I am grateful and happy to witness and share in his transition into new fatherhood.

These are my two weeks postpartum thoughts. I don’t have the energy to tie them together with a unifying thesis, but I wanted to share them in case somebody out there can relate to this experience, or somehow find it valuable.