Some of us have heard about The First Forty Days, a book that details a postpartum period during which a new mother should be nourished and cared for as she learns to become a mom, which can be seen as a kind of resistance to the social pressure to “bounce back” after giving birth. There is much wisdom here, although of course for many moms, the carefully prepared meals—and maybe even more so, the rest—that is prescribed can be hard to come by. After the birth of each of my two children, my well-intentioned herbal sitz baths went unused, sitting in the bathroom cabinet for the better part of a year before making their way to the trash. It took me a lot longer than that to “bounce back.” In fact, the concept of bouncing back—returning to some former version of my old body, my old self—has turned out to be a falsehood for me. I have experienced a different kind of reemergence into the world, although for me, it took not days or months, but years.
At some point in days after my husband’s and my daughter was born, he encouraged me to take a walk around the block. He suggested I go alone, but I could not stomach the idea of separation from my weeks old baby and decided to bring her with me. I can still see her tiny body, swaddled up, floating in the middle of the massive bassinet on the stroller someone had gifted us at our baby shower. (I was brand new at the parenting journey, and had not yet figured out how to use the Bjorn wrap we’d bought, or discovered the many benefits of a carrier.) The light outside felt impossibly bright, the sound too loud. Perhaps Gia agreed, because a couple minutes in, she began to cry, and I rushed home with her. We went out on many more successful walks in the months and years that followed, but a part of me remained enclosed with her, uncertain of where exactly I belonged in the wider world. Since before my pregnancy, my father had been suffering from cancer. On my first visit to see him with Gia, she was two months old. He was able to eat again and vowed to get strong enough to hold her. That never happened. A couple of months after her first birthday, I went to a hospital in Ohio where he’d been meant to have a life saving surgery to say goodbye. Once the pandemic hit months later, I already felt as if I’d withdrawn into another sphere.
In my metaphorical cave, as I was learning how to become a mom, grieving my father and trying to process events in our shared world, I wrote. I wrote the book that would become Exposure. I wrote about the multifaceted grief of parental loss. I wrote about the intensity of new motherhood and I wrote about mothers, our yearning for them, and the way that their presence and/or absence ripples throughout our lifetimes. I thought of my own sweet mother, who’d died the summer after I graduated college, and whom I often longed for. I wrote about the potency of female friendship. I wrote about artistic ambition, and the hunger to be seen, even as I was in hiding. I knew that hunger was still inside of me, although in order to find the courage to write the book, I often pretended it would never be read. I wrote about the pain of failure. I wrote about the way I saw the world I was raising my children in, with its deep divisions and fractured nervous system that left little space for the empathy that might heal us. I wrote about how things might look from different points of view. I wrote hoping to make space for complexity. I wrote as a way of reaching for myself.
I continued to write through my second pregnancy with my son. After his birth, I had intended to obey the rules of The First Forty Days, to rest at home, to eat the right foods to heal my body, but I ended up going out when he was just a couple of days old to take Gia to get a covid test. She was negative, and we went to the playground afterwards. I felt compelled to prove to her that I was still the mom I’d been, to minimize any anxiety she might feel about our separation following her baby brother’s arrival. I had planned for a meal delivery service recommended by our midwife, even though it stretched our budget, so that a couple of times a week in that first month I could feed my family grass-fed shepherds pie and chicken congee and we could all avoid cooking. It was a luxury—one I was grateful for, one that many new mothers don’t have. But it didn’t solve my depression. Each time I took my newborn son to the pediatrician’s office, I was presented with a mental health screening form for new moms. I checked every box that meant there’s nothing wrong. Five out of five I’m fine. A part of me knew better, but deep down I was afraid that to admit I was struggling and overwhelmed would mean that I was somehow failing at this most important of all jobs: motherhood. So I hid, instead.
When Kate, a mom at my daughter’s preschool who also had a newborn Dominic’s age, asked me how I was, I said what I usually said. “Tired, but good!”
“Really?” she asked. I nodded. “Cause to me this is hard af,” she said, or something along those lines.
“Oh,” I replied. In the face of her honesty, I instantly dropped my guard. “Yeah. I know. It is.”
So perhaps there wasn’t something wrong with me after all. Maybe it was just hard. Kate and I banded together with Marina, another new mom of two at the preschool. We’d all lost our mothers. We were all able to be honest about our struggles. Their friendship became a lifeline—one of my first steps back into the world. When I started going to Kate’s office at Netflix to work on Exposure after preschool drop off, pumping in an empty conference room for my son whom I was still breastfeeding, it was another half step.
In total, the book I began in earliest stages of motherhood took me seven years to write—my daughter is now six, and my son two and a half. Ultimately, it did shine a path through the grief and so much else and led me out of hiding. The release has left me feeling vulnerable, but it is a good kind of vulnerability, a necessary risk that comes along with allowing ones work, and oneself, to be seen. Now, in order to get ready for book events, I am finally changing out of my uniform of oversized hoodies and workout leggings, putting on lipstick, selecting dresses to wear that fit my body as it is, not as it once was. I bought a pair of pink heels that I could never where while carrying a child. It feels like a reemergence, of sorts, a ceremonial mark to end my long postpartum period. The point is not the clothes or the shoes, of course, but ability to step outside again, to marry my identifies and both a mother and and author.
Ava Dellaira is the author of the critically acclaimed young adult novels In Search of Us and Love Letters to the Dead, which was named Best Book of the Year by Apple, Google, BuzzFeed, the New York Public Library and the Chicago Public Library, and the recently published Exposure. 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, CA with her husband and their two young children.
