Eden Onpeng

Tag: motherhood

  • new motherhood. two weeks postpartum.

    new motherhood. two weeks postpartum.

    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.

  • Losing Friends as a New Parent – Is It Really Inevitable?

    Becoming a parent is a big life transition, one I’d been dreading for quite a while because of what I’ve heard from other people. You’ll never see your friends again. People drop off the map.

    I did have a friend (let’s call her Cang) who dropped her end of the rope after becoming a parent. We weren’t part of each other’s core friendship groups (she too maintained a group of old friends from middle school) so maybe this was part of why she chose to cut me out. After a couple of planned dates that didn’t work out from her end, I reached out to her via messages, and while she would respond, she ultimately stopped initiating. And eventually, after a few more one-sided exchanges, I stopped initiating, and as a result, we haven’t communicated since December 2023 when I reached out to her to wish her a merry Christmas and a happy birthday. Her son was about three years old.

    Maybe Cang felt there was a disconnect because I wasn’t a parent and she was, and perhaps there were things that I wouldn’t understand as a non-parent. Maybe she had outgrown the friendship since becoming a parent. This could be true, and I think she might have dropped me because I was always on the peripheral of her friendships–nice to have but not core–and so she could afford to drop me when priorities became tight. I imagine she would prioritize her middle school friends, and I get it.

    Our friendship died slowly, via slow “ghosting,” where I noticed only when I reached out, and later on, when I reviewed the time stamps and realized it had been a long time since I had last reached out to her, that she hadn’t initiated in our last few interactions, and that I now had little to talk about with her. There was no breakup message, she simply stopped watering the friendship and let it wither away. In her garden of friendships, ours was ultimately pruned via thirst.

    I pushed away my hurt and moved on with life even though it haunts me now, as I am about to give birth. I suppose I have the option to reach out to her again now in hopes of reconnecting now that I am also a parent, but the hurt remains and I don’t like the idea of being discarded again as soon as my compatibility wanes.

    Some of the things I cherish most in the world are my close friendships with my ride-or-die homies. These are the homies who showed up for our courthouse wedding, officiated by low-budget Bernie Sanders, who hugged me tightly during the fallout of my first marriage, and who went to my sister’s funeral. Even as my pregnancy progressed and mobility became an issue, I made it a point to host gatherings to bring my closest friends together–a precious thing in today’s fast-moving world and our adult lives. I grew up feeling very lonely, and friendships were like a ray of light in my mostly isolated existence, a lighthouse in the stormy waters of my childhood.

    As I’m on the cusp of giving birth, I dread losing these friendships. I’m afraid parenthood will somehow change me or my priorities to the point where I will drop these friendships, like those stories I’ve heard about people who disappear into parenthood and fall off from their friendships.

    I guess I’m afraid of the Unknown: where my mind will be as a new parent. I’m afraid I will become (due to brain changes, post-partum depression or stress) someone who no longer cares about these friendships, who lets them wither away like Cang did with my friendship. After I’m afraid my new priorities as a mom will cause me to drop everything that made me “me,” like my reading, my writing, and my friendships. Will these things no longer be important to me? Will I change that much as a person?

    I hear so much about new parents who feel like they’ve lost who they were before becoming parents. But I also hear that it gets better with time, as the baby grows and learns to sleep through the night.

    I guess this is something I won’t know until I’ve crossed the bridge. And perhaps these fears are unfounded based on the actual facts. Although I am the first in the group of homies to become a parent, my friends have been so supportive. They’ve filled our home with love. They’re going to be really cool aunties and uncles to Baby Daniel. Perhaps because I have this on my mind, and because it’s so important, I will find some way to maintain these precious friendships with my homies. Our friendships may change, just as they did when we became full-fledged adults with adult responsibilities of jobs, bills, and other duties, but it would mean the world to me if our friendships evolve, rather than wither, as we move through these new life milestones.

  • Reflections Before Giving Birth to My First Child

    My husband and I have been sick this week. First he was sick, and then two days later, I woke up with a swollen, irritated throat that evolved into a runny nose and then ongoing congestion and a lingering wet cough. The worst of it is over as of today. I’m glad I won’t have to give birth while suffering a cold. In between household tasks I have been laying in bed like a beached whale, resting my feet and catching my breath.

    In two days, we will go to the hospital to undergo induction to give birth to our first child and son. At 39 weeks, Baby Daniel will be full term, although being induced feels like prematurely evicting him (although who knows if he’d come early anyway). I feel bad. I imagine he’s nice and warm and comfortable in there. I feel him rolling, kicking, and hiccuping. He has passed all his non-stress tests with flying colors. “Happy baby,” the nurses call him.

    I picture his little hands and feet curling and kicking in the womb. I picture the nutrients being exchanged between us through the umbilical cord, which will be severed upon birth. This is the closest we will ever be linked physically, and after this point, the process of parenthood begins of raising him and slowly letting go as he grows more independent.

    Although my pregnancy has come with health complications and bodily discomforts, Baby Daniel’s impending departure feels bittersweet. Is it weird to say I will miss him, even though he will be right next to me as a newborn?

    This is the end of one stage (pregnancy) and the beginning of another one (new motherhood with a newborn). I am about to cross a bridge for the first time and have no idea how I feel once I’ve crossed it. I hope I will be happy. I hope the baby blues don’t hit me hard.

    On the surface, life has been peaceful. Joe and I were blessed to receive so much love and support from friends and chosen family at our baby shower. The silver lining of the estrangement from my parents has been peace and the ability to grieve my sister and process my childhood trauma in therapy.  

    I think of my mother, and her dark mood swings and constant meltdowns surrounding the times of her pregnancies and births of my little brother and sister. My father told me as a child that she’d tried to kill herself when she was pregnant with me. I think of how I used to resent my baby sister (13 years my junior) because of how angry and abusive my mother became toward me during her pregnancy. I believe my sister was a surprise baby, which could have contributed to my mother’s extra unhappiness. “I wish I’d aborted you,” my mother would say when trying to nurse her to sleep.

    Baby Daniel has been shy in ultrasounds all pregnancy—his hands are always in front of his face or he is turned away. We’ve been unable to get a clear 3D shot of him, so his face, beyond the basic outline, is mostly a mystery. I wonder how it will feel like to hold him in my arms, and to behold his little face—part me, and part Joe. Will he be a big baby or a regular-sized baby? A colicky baby or a chill baby? So much of Baby Daniel is unknown and abstract to me right now, aside from when we poke at each other through my tummy. I guess I won’t have a lot of answers until we are holding Baby Daniel in our arms and marveling at his sleeping form, how fragile, precious, and tiny he is, in our big, wide world.