Become an O:JA&L Member through Patreon.

Adrie Kusserow

WESTERN PSYCHONAUTS
of the POSTPARTUM PERIOD

In the end, I only have what slips through my fingers, the stuff of dreams, fading. My feverish brain drugged up and loopy, held together only by flashbacks, of a pelvis cracking open, all fissures and splits. I couldn’t sleep in case the contractions exploded, even though my child slept beside me. The birth over, my brain determined to stay awake and watch for more danger.

No rest, only the bits of panic jumping off the hot skillet of my brain. An exquisite manic madness, agile, deft, quick.

I wake and dip, wake and dip surfacing under the moonglow of a large black tv, alien mother of this ward, spewing silent colors that splash and swallow. Gloved mummies come and go, pressing my uterus for leftover blood. I don’t know where they’ve put the placenta, medical waste in a biohazard bag at the bottom of a plastic bin? I didn’t opt for a lotus birth, carrying the placenta around in a bowl, still attached to the baby, salting it for freshness. I wasn’t among those in my yoga class that viewed the cutting of the umbilical cord as traumatic, unnatural, waiting for it to fall off like an old withered bean. To me this was just more hegemonic spread of Trauma, Inc. into the birth canal. My baby was fine, it was my brain that was on fire.

Every hour or so, a peasant woman with large muscular hands washes my soggy heart in a stream, twisting, ringing, kneading it into something primal that has no name.

When my daughter cried, it startled the billion pigeons of my cells, took forever for them to settle down. But they did, sometimes enough for whole caves of awe to hollow me out as I fingered her pink toes, small as corn niblets, ears covered with fiddlehead down.

When she was satiated the white pearl of milk slipping from her mouth, the startle of twitches, smiles, pouts, jerks, began, the stuff American adults like to make meaning out of, psychological meaning that is, like, oh she’s a happy child, stubborn or determined.

I tell my students we no longer anthropomorphize the twitching blob in the crib, we Psychopomorphize and play pin the tail on the Donkey with Freud. And thus begins our descent into the Psychologized Self, when just as easily we could have spoken of spirits, clouds, dreams, the moon, creation myths, the mycelial web’s magnetic pull, or nothing at all.

For comfort I reached out to other new mothers, over the phone. I wandered into the dark pools of their depressions and emerged lonelier than before. We were all becoming Psychonauts, exploring, but stranded, washing up on shores of the Island of Psyche over and over. Never have I been so lonely as I was in the land of PostPartum Depression, with its reigning Queen of hormones and serotonin. The Queen of Hormones was whacked out, unreliable, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cross eyed, disheveled, a nut job, she was not to be trusted. The Princess Serotonin was apparently anorexic and in scarce supply. And then, the boring King, with his same old story of father loss and fear of abandonment, which he belched out proudly between burps.

I kept reaching out for the myths, the collective, the elder mothers of my species to talk to me of rites of passage, of evolution. I needed the woods. What I had was the bio-bible of What to Expect/(Fear) When You’re Expecting, which I promptly threw away. It’s not that I didn’t try to speak of this moment in other tongues, but they were always translated back into the language of Hormone and Serotonin, the main chess players my husband liked to move about during the tricky game of my re-entrance into normality.

In the land of American Parenting human development doesn’t just happen without prodding, stimulation and immense parental angst, deep journeys into one’s own troubled past. I remember my field work in New York City, the Haitian nannies on Park Avenue, taking the white infants out to the park while their cachectic, blonde mothers ran on the treadmill. How they’d laugh and mimic the neurotic mothers hunched over their infants crib, the fretting and turbulent weather of the upper middle class skies above them. Ever since parenting became a verb, it’s these women that ultramarathon. It’s also these women we owe utmost tenderness and compassion, just as we would any other exotic tribe. After laughing with the nannies, I felt cheap and mean. I should know better.

Sometimes I can sound lofty, anthropological, as if I’m high up in the sky again, looking down on humans fumbling around. Though I love it up here, of course I’m no different, I haven’t escaped Project Individual Self, locked as I am in the plush royal velvet of my exquisite emotions, my issues, whose jeweled crowns I have analyzed and adored, whose ornate rooms and neuroses I have explored and groomed and mostly made my home since childhood.

Lately, something else is going on. Lately even when I try I cannot stuff my experience into psychologized systems of thought, so I let them stay outside, and when they howl, and want a label, I listen, but I don’t let them in to the therapists den, or the DSM, because they are wilder and wilder than that, because don’t you think this is the least we can do, we humans, let ourselves be processed, held, understood by more than just us?

When a beautiful pregnant colleague wants postpartum advice, I retreat into Hormones and Serotonin, because I want to give her something resembling advice: warmth, solidarity, an elder, passing on wisdom. So I chatter, I watch myself from above actively reinforcing the biomedical discourse I just critiqued in class.

It’s what we do as humans when we want to connect, we turn to what’s available, we hope it will do the trick, we string tired word stitched to tired word between us, in rituals of rough encapsulation and domestication, and sometimes it has to be enough, this noble kind of reaching, a dogged, clumsy kind of loving, weaving our coarse nets between us, pulling each other ashore.

About the writer:
Recently published work includes “Quarantine Dreams” and “Revised Lonely Planet Guide to Holy Men.” Adrie Kusserow is a poet and anthropologist teaching at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Kusserow works with refugees internationally as well as in Vermont. Kusserow has two books of poetry published by BOA Editions, Ltd as part of their American Poets Continuum Series. Poems and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Juxtaprose and many other journals and anthologies.

Image: Mother and Child by Gari Melchers (1860-1932). Oil on canvas. 25 x 21.3 inches. Circa 1906. Public domain.

OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporationsupporting writers and artists worldwide.

Become an O:JA&L Member through Patreon.