An Ode (an Odie?) to Matrescence

Our neighbour, Betty*, seems nice at first. I meet her out on the street when I’m doing my daily walks. Fifteen minutes a day, the doctor tells me, and the nurse, and everyone I meet in the hospital until I feel like screaming.

I GET IT, I want to tell them, as I clutch my abdomen and hope my guts don’t fall out. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE WALKING! 

But I am nothing if not obedient, and so I walk. Fifteen minutes a day in the first week, twenty in the second, twenty-five, and so on. By two months’ postpartum, I think, I’ll be running marathons. Perhaps my period of matrescence will see me becoming a triathlete or, at the very least, a jogger. 

I read about matrescence online, where I read everything these days. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a book. 

Matrescence is, says the internet, the period after the birth of your child when you are changing from a mere woman into a Mother. The word Mother now has a capital M, because it’s special. 

I do a lot of rolling of my eyes, throughout my period of matrescence. I roll my eyes any time anyone says the word “magical” or describes my baby as an “angel”, because he is happy and smiley and generally easygoing. He saves his freakouts for the middle of the night, when no amount of reading about matrescence will ease the passage from bed to crib and back again. 

I roll my eyes when I am told not to worry about my “post-baby body”. My body is, now, a post-baby body, I think. There is pre and there is post, and now that he is here –  now that I am a Mother – my post-baby body is all there is. I’d better bloody get used to it.