This is mine and mine alone right now. My own personal mountain to climb, my own personal confessional to bare my soul in.
Medical grade pumps sound like life-support machines...soothing, rhythmic, the steady thrum of discontent with my reality, the drone of personal syncopation behind the melody of a life I chose with eyes wide open.
Sleepless nights could be hypnotic and dreamy. I could roll over and find my newborn next to me and breast feed until we both fall back to sleep, enjoying the haze. Instead, I am standing in front of a computer screen, pecking away with plastic boob tubes strapped to my chest in an cyber-futuristic hands free pumping bra, staring at the milk levels rising in the cylinders and wondering at how much or little humans can habituate themselves too. Reality is becoming hypnotic. Now my dreams are filled with lactating women whose milk literally gushes out of their bodies while my drips at an adequate and less vigorous volume. They run rife with husbands sleeping on the floor next to infants while an indolent mother snores obliviously on in a huge bed in the room across the house. They toss me into sunny days on trails in the Gorge with nursing pit-stops that are pain free. The taunt me with a body that fully accepts nurturing as well as being fit to nurture.
My bum has stopped throbbing from post partum hemmerhoids because of cold compresses, witch hazel soaked cotton balls and herbal laxative teas administered around the clock, dead of night or day. My vagina is finally healed and it no longer hurts to urinate, a day before my rear end went out. My thumb is still trying to heal, two months after the date of original cut. I pick away at it methodically and regularly while pumping, holding Espen, or staring out the window during a moment of nothingness. My emotions are thin and at the surface. They are plunging into the deeps of my soul and trying to hunker down between gales.
I dread the nights but I am starting to become soothed by the tiny noises that echo down the hall as I try to sleep. My fantasies include sleeping in a bed with my husband and son with complete relaxation and ability to let go.
Here are my favorite beliefs causing my discomfort. 1. I do not deserve to be nurtured. 2. I do not deserve to be myself. I have hemmorhoids because I do not want to release them, eliminate them without pain. I have tender, limited use breasts because I want to hang on to the above two statements as my reality. I want to let go. I want to take back my eagle heart that is larger than life and truly, fully, integrate it back into my chest so I can breathe and feed and just be content. Everyone wants me to succeed, even the ones originally responsible for inspiring these beliefs to seed in childhood. It is up to me now.
Metaphor: Endless and regular pumping to draw out the milk of self-nurturing.
Reality: Endless and regular pumping.
Equalibrium: Dogged persistence and grace land me in a state of acceptance of both myself and the current situation.
