Six Months Postpartum: A Colony of Selves

It’s cold out here. The wind is merciless, and the shallow parts of the sea are covered in ice. We go on long walks—Bean bundled up in a stroller, in a ski suit and a footmuff—and I, desperately gripping the hood of my coat with my frozen hands. She sleeps well outside.

Sometimes I stop just to look at her, to make sure she’s still there, still breathing, still pink-cheeked and soft and mine. There’s something almost unreal about how peacefully she gives herself over to sleep, as if the world has never once hurt anyone.

The cold makes everything feel sharper. The light is sharper. The sounds are sharper, boots crunching on the frozen sand, the hush of frozen water, the faint metallic clink of a dog’s leash somewhere behind us. Even my thoughts feel more precise, as if winter squeezes them into cleaner shapes. There’s no room for softness out here. No room for the unnecessary.

And yet this is where I feel most tender.

The sea doesn’t look like the sea when it’s frozen at the edges. It looks like it’s thinking. Like it’s paused mid-sentence. Like it’s deciding whether it’s safe to move again. I understand that feeling. I’ve lived in it for months.

Bean sleeps, and I walk. I pass other parents sometimes, their faces red and determined, their gloves thick, their posture saying: we do this because we have to. We exchange a look that isn’t quite a smile but contains one. A brief recognition. A shared citizenship in this strange new country where your heart lives outside your body and you push it through the winter in a pram.

I think a lot about Matrescence, both the state and the book. I think of the fact that a Portuguese man o’ war is not a single organism, but a colony. I don’t know why it shocked me so much. Ever since I read it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. A few weeks ago, on a beach in Spain, I saw what I thought was a man o’ war, I had just read they were showing up on the shores of Andalucia. Scared and excited, I came closer. It turned out to be a plastic trash bag. I wanted to pick it up and throw it in a recycling bin, but Bean was sleeping in a carrier, so I didn’t.

In one world, my body is still telling the story of what happened. The softness of my stomach that didn’t snap back. The strange tenderness I still feel in parts of myself I didn’t even think about before. The way my hips seem wider, my posture slightly different, as if my skeleton rearranged itself for someone else and hasn’t fully moved back. My old bras are too small. My breasts are still tiny but the ribcage has yet to return to normal.

Six months is enough time for other people to start forgetting that something enormous happened to you. It’s enough time for the word postpartum to sound unnecessary, even indulgent, as if you are holding onto something you should have already moved past.

But I haven’t moved past it.

I think about my labour a lot. How the epidural failed. How the water didn’t break. I expected the water to break when I was having lunch or walking with my girlfriend, when I was in a pool or shopping for groceries or baby clothes. The midwife broke my water when I was eight centimeters dilated. Today I rewatched the first video we ever took of Bean, minutes after she was born, with her tiny red body searching for breast. I hear Fredrik say: Are you dying? Why is it beeping? I realise he is talking about the machines. The heartbeat monitor fell of my body. There was no need for it anymore. Her heart now was Earth-side.

Six months postpartum doesn’t feel like the aftermath to me. It’s still the event.

Motherhood is management as much as it is love. It’s logistics and timing and counting: counting ounces, counting naps, counting hours since the last feed, counting how many minutes you have before the baby gets bored of the same toy.

Six months postpartum, you learn there is no neutral state. Either the baby is about to need something, currently needs something, or just finished needing something but will need something else in ten minutes. And I have an easy baby!

Of course I matter. But the baby matters louder.

You can only grow around what happened.

I think that’s what this time is: growing around what happened.

We read No Matter What by Debi Gliori in Russian. It’s a beautiful translation. Gorgeous even. A very Russian one. In the original version Small says, “But what about when you’re dead and gone – would you love me then, does love go on?” In the Russian translation Small says “when we are both dead and gone, will you stop loving me?” There was no need to change “you” for “we,” the rhyme would have worked either way. I go down the rabbit hole and find out that for American version the text was changed to “And if you are far away, love disappears or remains?”

I keep turning it over in my mind the way you turn a smooth stone in your pocket, thumb circling the same place until the skin warms. When we are both dead and gone. Not when you are. Of course, there is a biological destiny in the original. Children should always outlive their parents.

It’s strange, how translation isn’t only about language. It’s about what a culture can bear to say out loud. American children get the “far away” version, the kind that keeps death at a polite distance, as if it might be offended if you named it too directly. Russian children get the blade. Russians have never been shy about the blade. There is a particular honesty to it, a willingness to hand it to a child and say, Here. This exists. It has a name. You will hold it at some point. But you will survive the holding.

It is both cruel and nurturing. It says: both. We. Together. It doesn’t ask the child to imagine being abandoned by death. It asks them to imagine a shared ending. Maybe that’s why it feels “very Russian”: there is an acceptance that pain is part of love, and that we go through it alongside each other.

I wonder when I learned about death. Not in the abstract way, every child learns the word early, like a fairy tale word, like “dragon” or “castle.” I mean when it became real, with its texture and smell. When it became something that could happen to everyone else, and therefore to me. When it stepped out of story and into life.

Maybe it happens in layers.

That’s the thing, I think. Childhood relies on a collective agreement not to mention certain things too directly. The grown-ups keep the doors closed, keep the lights on, keep the words soft. They tell you the pet “went to sleep,” as if sleep is the same as ending. As if language can trick reality. And for a while it works. For a while, you can actually live as though the world is built to hold you.

I think about the man o’ war again—the not-one-but-many creature. How it drifts looking singular, but it’s actually a collective. That feels like motherhood too. You become a colony. You become made of selves: the self who remembers who she was before, the self who is this child’s entire sky, the self who is hungry and lonely and resenting, the self who is undone by love, the self who is watching for danger. You move as one, but you’re not one. You float.

Is it why Lucy Jones wrote about it?

I stare at Bean’s hair while I think this, the soft crown of it, with the university professor bald patch on the back. The tiny gestures that mean nothing and everything: the fist unclenching. The sudden serious gaze. The sigh that sounds far too old for such a small body. It’s unbearable to love someone that much.

All I know is that even in the dark, even in the knowledge of endings, I want her to feel what Small needs to feel: that love doesn’t vanish just because you name the worst thing.

That even when you say it plainly—death, gone, never again—love still stays.

It stays.

I stay. A colony of me.