Wombtime

When I am asked what the most difficult aspect of becoming a mother has been, my answer is that I have not had a full night’s rest since the night I went into labor. Compounding that fatigue was the slow recovery from giving birth, regained in two to three hour increments of sleep. A book I read during pregnancy described this tiredness as “a kind of death”.

In having Charlie, I did not foresee the intensity of what my night times would become. I did not conceive of how parenting extends into the expanse of the night.

There have been many eras of sleep in the four short months since my son was born. Each begins and ends unexpectedly, often imperceptibly, one shifting into the other. Short stretches of sleep. Struggling to breastfeed. Longer stretches of sleep. The blurry, warm light of the hallway, the small fluorescent light of the breast pump. Dark walks down the stairs to return a bottle to the refrigerator.

For his first four months, Charlie slept in our room. I am convinced that I would wake seconds before he woke, a mothering instinct flowering in me, attuned to his sleep cycles. When Charlie slept with us, our darkened room became a womb, a cocoon, a protection from night until morning. When I entered to go to bed, the lights were off. I decided not to look at my phone when I crossed the threshold. I began reading with a neck light.

In his book Anam Cara, poet John O’Donahue names the night “wombtime”. He writes “The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away”.

A mother’s womb is a noisy place. The rushing of amniotic fluid, the thumping of the mother’s heart, and blood flowing create white noise likened to the sound of traffic on a busy road. When sleeping, babies would prefer the sound of a running vacuum to silence.

Techniques for triggering a baby’s calming reflex imitate the sensations of the womb. Complete darkness. “Shushing” and sound machines. Tight swaddling and vigorous movements of rocking, bouncing, and jiggling. All mimic the conditions of their previous, comforting, womb home.

Despite my best efforts, my baby is not sleeping through the night. Even in the span that I have been writing this, my feelings toward his sleep have wrung out of me exhaustion, exasperation, triumph, tenderness, anger, tears.

As much as I want to embrace the dark, I am frustrated by it, frustrated by his cries, the racing of my heart, the feeling of being on the edge of a cliff as his whimpers build to wails. My body is in constant tension, waiting to jump into the fray. In the dark I have too much time to think. It is an anxious place, my daily worries and insecurities race.

There was a time in my life when I learned to be comfortable in darkness. It seems it is something I must learn again.

After my father died, I found immense comfort in the writing of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun. She writes about the charnel grounds of Tibet. Because of the freezing climate, the people of Tibet cannot put their dead into the frozen earth. In a practice of above ground burial, they cut up the bodies of the dead and lay them out to become fodder for vultures, the “sky burial” becoming a bloody yet sacred landscape. It is a willingness to face death in a way that I cannot fathom.

We moved my son out of our room into his nursery. I sleep more soundly. I turn the light on when I enter, I choose when to turn it off. That quiet acceptance of groundlessness, wombtime, what Chodron writes as “completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time” is flickering.

Sources:

Chodron, Pema. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. United States: Shambhala, 2016, 2, 124.

O'Donohue, John. Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. United Kingdom: HarperCollins, 2009, 2.

Jansson, Laura S. Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy. United States: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2020, 227.