Anxiety, Alienation, and Control
By. Salome MC
Anxiety
My one-month-old son was asleep. I was in a contorted position between sitting and laying down, on the corner of the sectional sofa in our living room. This was where I nursed, pumped milk and passed out every now and then from lack of sleep. But that day something was different. It was the first time that I didn’t feel any pain from my C-section incision. I could touch the scar and ponder the odd, numb feeling, breathing it in, muse at its size and appreciating that it was possible. A surge of energy washed over, and I had a feeling that my body might handle the regular level of activity I’d kept to a minimum since birth. This newfound vigor was like a wake up call, and I took a look around the room with newly polished eyes. Silence; except the regular, fast-paced breaths of my newborn, as if in a constant state of panting; interrupted with occasional chuckles, moans, shouts even. Why do say sleeping like a baby again? It’s anything but peaceful. And my mind, it’s not peaceful either, taken over by chaotic neural activity as I take in the room corner to corner, wall to wall. The muslin blankets – which I was told you can’t have enough of; so I bought six but I only used two – were stretched on the floor, half on the carpet half on the vinyl flooring that thought of itself as wood, along with the collapsed tower of colorful and patterned cloth diapers. Montessori objects that he was too young to play with, and the cushions on the sofa had ventured to different parts of the room. The Steam controllers were somehow displaced, despite the fact that we couldn’t even dream of playing games for the past month. The leaves of the Devil’s Ivy were dark from layers and layers of skin particles. The ginger roots I’ve dried and placed in the middle of the dining table were in disarray, more than any Wabi Sabi aesthetic would allow. Thinking of the kitchen doubled the tightness I felt in my heart. Bedroom, oh the bathrooms, windows, window panes, the porch…
That day I turned into an anxious person. I couldn’t sit still, unless the apartment, which I would be the full-time resident for the next five months during my maternity leave, was in a compulsively perfect shape. Our minimalistic approach to furniture made the endeavor possible, but debilitating. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of this fixation; I was entertained. I surely was trying to prove that having a baby is not an obstacle to having an orderly life, challenging all those mom-memes and mom-life hashtags I’ve clicked on skeptically while pregnant. The thing is though, I was never a person who paid heed to symmetry, or raise a finger to wipe a window. It was anxiety and it was taking over my life, getting in the way of enjoying my newborn and his breaths that swept my heart like a windstorm. There was always a problem to be solved, a flaw that needed to be fixed. Always on my feet, like my grandmother and her grandmother, while I didn’t need to be, unlike my grandmother and her grandmother. I couldn’t get the rest I needed to take care of a newborn and his windstorms. I ‘d read a lot about postpartum depression, from .edu sites to mom-blogs, and this didn’t look like anything I’ve read.
What the fuck was going on?
Alienation
Contractions were painful, and I was forgetting to breathe as my gaze was fixated on my son’s heart monitor. The doctors and nurses were on a mission: “Wait, wait… Push! Push!” But the numbers were fluctuating ominously, above hundred, below seventy. I could see my O.B.’s calm and focused face through the little opening on the curtain between us, but the nurses were moving a bit faster than before, their voices carrying an extra level of hidden intensity. I looked for and found my husband’s face, all but eyes covered in an operating room mask. He was quick to notice and his eyes smiled, before I could read what was behind.
“His heartbeat drops during contractions. We have to go for C-section.”
My O.B. didn’t like the idea of the Caesarian. High vaginal birth stats were a bragging point for doctors and the hospital. So she kept reminding me to watch my diet all throughout the pregnancy. Don’t want the baby to grow too big and get stuck. So naturally she wanted to try vacuuming before having to resort to cutting me up. I didn’t know what vacuuming was, and turns out it’s exactly what it sounds like. She approached, holding something that in a flash looked like a blue disk; I heard a popping sound, simultaneously witnessing a gush of blood splashing all over her face through my little window.
“Ok, C-section it is.”
Pain, sweat, blood and various machines humming in different frequencies, and only one thought in my mind. My body, which managed to bring the baby to the brink of birth, was now trying to kill it.
Once the uncontrollable post-traumatic shivering of my body was over, I finally held my son. I was told the placenta was so abnormally calcified that couldn’t supply him with oxygen during contractions.
It was then; it was in that moment that I reached a new level of alienation from my own body. It wasn’t new, I had felt something similar a decade ago when that lady from the morality police grabbed my arm in Haft-e Tir Square. And before that, almost twenty years ago, when I was walking down a busy street towards the bus stop, having just come out of the high school, and I was catcalled for the first time in my life. And even before that, when my elementary school’s headmaster made that speech about us being obligated to wear hijab in the eyes of God, now that we were almost nine years old. I probably felt it even before that, long before I felt anything else, as a woman who was a girl and was always destined to be a woman.
But this was a new level, and in this moment my relation with my body changed dramatically. Of course three months of hyperemesis, watching my belly grow and stretch and crack while hormones went haywire hadn’t done any good to our relation; mind you. But at least it was nurturing, sacrificing, caring. Not now, not with the calcified fucking placenta. You had one job, asshole.
After the surgery, the nerve damage caused my abdomen feel like a second degree burn for almost six months. I cringed every night as I robbed the Moroccan Argan oil my aunt sent to me on the loose belly, robotically, detached. But the last arriving complication was the greatest of all. I mentioned something as simple as shortness of breath during my postpartum visit, three or four days after being discharged. Nurse Judy got worried; we smiled at her due diligence as she rushed us to the ER. A CT scan revealed a blood clot in my left lung. I cried, my mom cried, and I got mad at her for crying, and she cried some more. Pulmonary Embolism. For three months I had to inject my thighs with blood thinners, which not only added yet another grotesque feature to my already broken body, but it was painful to the touch. At least I was alive.
Control
The party was in one of the upper town areas in Tehran where rich people lived, I do not remember exactly where. One of my friends who is a famous rapper was invited, we joked about eating rich people’s food and and went together. I didn’t really go because of the food; those days I was trying to get out of my comfort zone. As I sat silently next to my friend and pretended to be busy examining the patterns of carpet, the owner, a man in his thirties who clearly considered himself a very civilized and sophisticated individual, turned to and asked, “Well, what do you do?”
As a long-time loner, I was a late bloomer in social skills, so for a second the cat got my tongue. Should I start with my music activities? Or my recent resignation from the clothing that I worked as a designer for three years? Maybe the institute I teach English at, or the book I’d translated that was just published? Maybe the best would be to talk about the future, how I got a scholarship from the Japanese government and would be studying my masters in Japan next year? But before any thought had a chance to turn into words in my mouth, this civilized, sophisticated upper-city man made it cleat that he wasn’t really interested in an answer.
He talked to the air, one side of his lip curled up as if he’s very amused by himself. “Oh, you’re just busy being pretty” he said, and continued his conversation with my friend, as I went back to examining the carpet patterns.
This was one of many experiences over the years that pushed me hard to be in charge of my own body and mind as much as possible. I was so in need of autonomy in my own work that I took it to the extreme, and learned every aspect of music production so I can create what I want to create with absolute control. That wasn’t enough; I got a master’s degree in video production so I can make my own music videos too. This control gave me power; the power gave me more independence. It became one of the most important parts of my existence, and played a big role in every choice that I made, no matter how big or small.
Postpartum Anxiety
My first experience with a therapist was in Iran, for clinical depression, around ten years ago. It left a very sour taste in my mouth, so it took a while before I gave in to my husband’s insistence and got an appointment from a postpartum specialist.
The extra weight, the enlarged womb, milk-filled breasts, bruises and cracks of my postpartum existence, gave me the feeling of being an immigrant in my own body. Breastfeeding, and my son’s vitality relaying on the productivity of my body, made me feel like my body did not belong to me. I had no autonomy over my body.
Having six months off from the organization I worked as a media producer was a great opportunity for a new mother like me, but the lack of social activities and productivity left me with a sense of isolation for those six months. I tried taking notes and developing my own personal projects, but the physical exhaustion prevented my mind from processing any complex thoughts. I had no autonomy over my mind. Losing the autonomy over my body and mind, which was the most prominent aspect of my life for the past decade, pushed me to try and have control over the environment instead. The environment and its small, insignificant, uncomplicated aspects. Every time my newborn was asleep, I was either cleaning and arranging and adjusting, or was unconscious on the sofa, too tired to fall asleep.
According to American Pregnancy Association, around 10% of the new mothers suffer from Postpartum Anxiety. The mood disorder, along with a few others, are added to the postpartum disorder categories recently, and therefore there are not as many studies and resources on it, compared to the now well-known Postpartum Depression. (https://americanpregnancy.org/first-year-of-life/forms-of-postpartumdepression/) Postpartum Anxiety might have a variety of symptoms with varying levels of intensity, which makes it even harder to recognize.
My son is now almost 8 months old. My body is healing, the pains and bruises have disappeared, and gave way to my new “mom-bod”. The body I know will never return, but I am getting to know this new body which carries the shared history of my son and I like a relic. It’s been two months since I’m back at work, teaching poetry and music to underprivileged kids in our city. I just finished my first personal project after giving birth, and I am working on a new, exciting project that would be in a completely different medium from what I’m used to.
Yes, neither my body nor my mind will ever be like before birth, and they shouldn’t. My autonomy is coming back, transformed, shape-shifted, risen from ashes. I am glad I sought help, and I hope any new mother who reads this and feel the tiniest of recognition, will find the courage to seek help too.
Salome MC is an Iranian musician, multimedia artist and educator. She is the first woman to make hip hop music in her home country. She has performed world wide and her artwork has been showcased internationally. Salome is the recipient of 2009 Female Change Maker Award and 2018 Artist Trust Fellowship Award.