The pulse of a mother’s postpartum anxiety

At night I lay awake, my body buzzing. It’s like electricity is moving through me. I cannot make it stop, for all the things I’ve tried, it will not stop. My heart thrashes into my rib cage like a caged animal, like she has fists and she wants out, like she wants to walk around this world and see things for herself. Night after night she thrashes, for weeks and months on end until I entirely forget what sleep is, until buzzing/thrashing/the strange tune of modernity becomes the only song inside of me.

Eventually, I am sent in for an electrocardiogram to make sure my heart is alright. When I show up for the appointment, I am struck by how many people are sitting in the waiting room, by how many troubled hearts are palpitating alongside my own––though we do not look one other in the eyes, we do not acknowledge the crisis after crisis in the news, how the skies are smoky again, we are told not to go outside and in the same breath we are told that everything will be alright. So we sit stooped over our thrashing hearts, spooked by the strangeness of the seasons, by our inability to reach out our hands and hold one another, to set this world into a different kind of motion.

When the nurse calls me back to record the waves in my chest, I follow him like an anxious animal emerging from the burning forests––all I can think about is water. Thankfully, he is familiar with the kind of animal that I am, having seen us all day long for weeks and months on end, he works with a kind of tenderness I am not prepared for, a swiftness that lets me breathe. Then he shows me the sonic image of my heart––dark red lines on white and green paper, lines that look like the scales of music, like jagged mountains punctuated by the seriousness of flat footed valleys, and I want to walk across them, to feel the way my body echoes the rhythmic terrain of the Earth.

When the doctor comes in to look at my music scales, he smiles with kind eyes and tells me that my heart is perfectly healthy. My husband says maybe it is just too big, maybe it feels crammed inside of my small chest. I don’t doubt that both my doctor and husband are correct, but what they cannot see nor measure is precisely how many times my heart has been broken open.

I know there are chasms wrong with the way we are living now, I know my body is expressing the trembling sorrows of these times. I know mothers’ feet grow gnarled roots that reach deep into the heart of the Earth and so we become the trunks that rise up from those tremors, we become the most trustworthy way of discerning the health or dis-ease of the world that our children will one day inherit.

There are so many mothers who tell me they can not sleep at night from the buzzing and the thrashing, from the terrifying thoughts they have about being alone with their babies, from the improbability of their children’s futures. But they always say these things in whispers because everyone knows the ramifications of speaking loudly. Everyone knows it is far easier to medicate the mothers, to desensitize and silence them instead of trying to change the culture.