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Postpartum anxiety

No one really talks about the anxiety that comes with having a baby…

You are in constant worry about many things

You are worried about yourself,about how you will snap back into your old self

How your healing journey is going,being careful not to get infected

Worried about your mental health and trying hard to keep it in check

Worried that you are worrying and that it will cost your milk supply

Worried about how you have neglected yourself, and the things you love doing,wondering if you’ll ever get time for them

Worried that you smell of fresh breastmilk,puke from last night, pee and poop from the last time you changed him and he showered you with them

Worried about not having enough sleep and you might end up fatigued

Worried about your child,this comes first

Am I a good mum?

Am I doing a good job?

Does he feel loved by me?Am I loving him enough?

Am I holding him enough?Am I overdoing it that he might get too attached

Worried if he is comfortable,

comfortable in his sleeping position,comfortable while carrying him

Worried if his head dangles and gets hurt

Worried that I might put him in a sitting position way too early and hurt his tiny spine

Might he choke in his sleep?

Did he breastfeed enough?

Is he in the correct breastfeeding position?

Do i have enough milk to satisfy him?

Will he have colic?

Is he having gas?

Did he burp?

Did he poop?

Is his poop the correct color and consistency?

Is he pooping enough,is he pooping too much?

Am i overfeeding him?

Is he gaining enough weight,is he overweight?

Did i bath him well?

Is he feeling fresh?

Is his environment clean and sterile enough for him?

Are all the bugs away from him?

Will he get a bug bite?

Is he feeling hot,is he too cold?

Will he be sick if I don’t overdress him?

Have I overdressed him that he might overheat and suffocate?

Even After dotting all ‘i’ and crossing all ‘t’ these thoughts still consume and you are expected to be on your best and show up for your baby without fail

Rarely do people check on the mother when they visit,they are always concerned about the baby,yet the mother needs at least three hours of uninterrupted sleep to gain her sanity

Someone to check up on their mental and to ask them how they are,REALLY,

I never knew I would be so worried about so many things all at once

No one told me about it

Im hoping to do better on my next and a perfect job with my first,despite it all.

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Baby Blues

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Book Review: The End of Summer and The Summer Book

Tove Jansson’s novella, The Summer Book, is a perfect read for the month of August and the end of summer! Known for her delightful children’s book series centered around the “Moomintrolls,” Jansson’s adult fiction is likewise filled with light, beauty, and humor. Even so, along with their topics of youth and summer, Jansson’s adult works (including The Summer Book) are also concerned with aging, the fall season (the end of summer), and death.

The Summer Book, considered a modern classic, is largely focused around the daily summer activities of a little girl and her grandmother on a remote island. The most recent publication of the book in 2008, 34 years after its initial publication in English in 1974, testifies to the power and beauty of this work. While the language of the book is syntactically simple and the subject matter is deceivingly light, its pages are filled with moments of suggestive wisdom and penetrating clarity.

The Summer Book is almost relentlessly focused on the present moment. The marching of time is continuously hinted at, but any deep concerns about the past or future are dealt with by the book with wry subtlety. “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment,” Jansson’s Sophia proclaims upon composing the final lines of her book, A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart. While the little girl muses over the physical and intellectual life of worms, her grandmother is tasked with the book’s transcription. Sophia narrates, “The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts.” What starts out as a potentially cute activity becomes a meditation on death and dying and growing up. Both Grandmother and Sophia are “growing up” and moving towards the end of the phase of life that they are currently living. This experience proves to be as painful and uncertain for them as it is for the worm. After narrating this line, Sophia, who is prone to outbursts of energy and petulance, suddenly stands up and shouts, “Say this: say I hate everything that dies slow! Say I hate everything that won’t let you help!” Apparently, Sophia harbors anxiety and pent-up frustration about her grandmother’s old age and her own inability to do anything about the passing of time. Meanwhile, “the wind blew and blew. The wind was always blowing on this island, from one direction to another. A sanctuary for someone with work to do, a wild garden for someone growing up, but otherwise just days on top of days, and passing time.”

As the book goes on the island becomes a metaphor for time. Grandmother thinks to herself, “an island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place… Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”

The island is terrible to outsiders because those on the island have seemingly lost any real sense of time and of the world outside of the island. The grandmother and Sophia take refuge in this. For the most part, they ignore or make light of both past and future. That is, until it comes time to leave the island. The grandmother and grandchild act as care-takers for the island and have trouble letting go at the end of the season. But, when the little family leaves the island at the end of the summer, the island is indifferent to their leaving.

In the final pages of the book Grandmother goes outside in the cool night and finds her way in the dark to sit on a stump. She watches a boat pass by and listens to the thump of her heart and “for a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while.” At the end of the book, summer is coming to an end. Grandmother is approaching death and Sophia is approaching the end of childhood. But for now, in the book’s final pages, we are left with a moment of stillness in the present. Each character faces the path that Jansson leaves open for readers-- a path that gestures towards the terrors and delights of Being.

The great pleasure of reading The Summer Book is the way it combines the dark with the light. In the climax of the novella in terms of action, a massive storm wracks the island and causes extensive damage. Sophia thinks she caused the storm because earlier that day whenever she was desperately bored, she prayed to God to “let something happen.” During the storm, Sophia climbs up into a tower room and “she [sees] that the island had shrunk and grown terribly small, nothing but an insignificant patch of rocks and colorless earth. But the sea was immense… There was only this one island, surrounded by water… forgotten by everyone but God, who granted prayers. ‘Oh God,’ said Sophia solemnly, ‘I didn’t realize I was so very important. It was awfully nice of You.’”

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And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.

—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

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“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget”

— ~ Arundhati Roy

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Currently reading The God of Small Things

"If you're happy in a dream...does that count? The happiness does it count?"

— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

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@utopie-sempiternelle

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‘the nightingale’ by ida rentoul outhwaite

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"Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit."

-Neil Gaiman

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Dreaming of childhood and summer and lemonade and grass with daisies in it and running through sprinklers and devouring books in an afternoon and trying to swing high enough to fly

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books & flowers on 35mm film🌙

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“She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone.”

— Ann Brashares (via thoughtkick)

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Keats’ copy of Paradise Lost

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https://www.instagram.com/p/CM_9XEeJmRU/

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Interview with the Vampire (1994)