At your six-week postpartum visit, you tell your OB, in a bit of an understatement, that you’ve been feeling anxious. He says it’s normal and provides a therapist referral. Unexpected anger churns in your belly. Anthony wanted you to go to therapy.
After the pelvic exam, the doctor says you’re healing well and clears you for exercise. You feel hope and relief. That’s what you need. You don’t need to go deeper inside your head; you need to get out of it. You ran through your divorce. You’ll run through this.
Your feet swelled up when you were pregnant and haven’t returned to normal, so you need new running shoes. You get Caroline dressed and into the stroller. She’s content for the eight blocks it takes to walk to the store, but as soon as you get inside, she starts crying. You sit on one of the benches for trying on shoes and feed her. You’re wearing a nursing cover, but the position is awkward. Several people see your breasts. You burp Caroline and feel a river of warm spit-up down your back. A moment later, you hear and smell her diaper fill. The store doesn’t have a bathroom for customers, and they won’t let you use the one they’ve obviously got for employees, so you go across the street to a coffee shop to change Caroline and clean yourself in a bathroom with a wet floor and no toilet paper. When you’re finally back at the store, you agree to the first shoe you try on because Caroline is starting to fuss and probably needs to eat again soon.
You wear three bras on that first run. You nurse Caroline and pump before you go, but your breasts still heave and pull with every step. Your knees hurt from the extra weight. You can feel your pulse in your perineum where the doctor stitched you up. Your lungs are shocked into action and the air stings your throat. This sucks, you think. This sucks, this sucks. Soon it’s the only thought that can make its way past the pain, which is of course why you’re doing this.
You make it once around the reservoir before you have to stop, just over a mile and a half. In the year after your divorce, you were up to eight miles a day, ten on the weekends. You’d run through anything then—sore throat, shin splints, snow—dreading the first mile, craving the last, pushing toward the moment when you felt like you could run forever. Like if you could just stay in motion, you’d get to somewhere other than where you were.
You get home drenched and heaving. Before the elevator opens on your floor, you hear Caroline screaming. Opposing forces pull at you. The primal instinct to soothe her. The desire to turn around and drop the unbearable weight of being so fiercely needed.
Drew is frantically bouncing her, his shirt covered in spit up. “She’s been like this the whole time,” he says, handing her off before the door even closes behind you.
“Give me a second. I can’t feed her with three bras on,” you say.
Caroline latches on and sucks ferociously. You feel your milk let down, tingling and aching through your breasts. Her little body relaxes as she shifts to big slow gulps. Her eyelids flutter. You run the pads of your fingers across her scalp. You rock back and forth, cradling her. A softening moves through you. You sigh deeply, sinking into the chair.
Madison’s mother will never hold her child again. Your brain now presents this information whenever Caroline is in your arms.