Eve Morton

Tag: postpartum

  • 31 for 31: Motherhood’s Mite by Eve Morton

    Another postpartum story!

    I am not kidding when I say that the best way to process all the nasty feelings postbirth and the hormonal ups and downs was to write fiction. Whenever I could. Which meant a lot of shorter stories, and my goodness, so many of them were horror.

    Sometimes it’s the actual birth or body processes that were horrifying. Sort of like how common mastistis is for nursing women. I had never heard of this before two days postpartum, and then it was my #1 fear. It sounded horrible and painful.

    So I had to write a story about it.

    But it’s also how other treat you postpartum that’s scary. No one seems to trust your word anymore, and no one even seems to see you when you have a baby at the same time. You become spectral, a ghost, and yet, you are also supposed to feel and bleed and produce, produce, produce.

    Easy to see how these two beasts came out in Motherhood’s Mite. For an early morning, it was a very good therapy tool, almost as good as formula itself. For those who have nursed and had a child, you probably know this feeling. And for those of you who haven’t, well, let me entertain you for the next 2000 words as I fought off this particular demon of my parental past.

    Motherhood’s Mite

    by Eve Morton

    Kelly’s milk had turned to dust. When she pressed Jason’s mouth to her breast during his three-am feed, all she heard was coughing. Then sputtering like a worn-down exhaust pipe so much like the one from her first car. Soon her bare toes were covered in sand. She dreamed she was on a beach, far away from the horrors of exclusive breastfeeding and mastitis that would not relent, but Jason’s wail rudely returned her his blue painted bedroom. She turned on his elephant night-light and gasped.

    His mouth was brown, the color of suede. His tongue pressed to the top of his toothless mouth as his cry turned inconsolable. He looked as if he’d eaten a vacuum cleaner bag, though that was locked away in the closet along with the other hazardous items for newborns. She searched his crib, the diaper changing area, and inside his swaddle for the source. She only came away with small bits of grit and dirt. When Kelly sneezed moments later, her breasts leaked. 

    No, she realized. Her breasts didn’t leak like they had been anytime she thought of her baby or husband or watched a sappy commercial. Her breasts weren’t producing anything at all but a faint itchiness that soon took over her entire body. She was shaking, wracking her body with her long nails which bent like cue cards now that she was eight weeks postpartum, when her husband came inside.

    “What’s wrong?” He picked up Jason and held him close, only to track around more grit and dirt. “Oh, God.”

    “I think…” Kelly opened her robe, displaying her breasts that were lumpy, worse than the six clogged ducts she had at once during week one. Her left breast seemed to tremble. Sand and dust and dirt littered her nursing bra. She closed her robe with another shudder, followed by a wave of sudden and sharp pain. 

    “I think…” she repeated, “we’re gonna need to go to the hospital.”

    *

    “Well, isn’t this strange…” The doctor held up the results from Kelly’s chest x-ray and ultrasound in front of the light source in his room. “Very interesting, indeed.”

    Kelly wanted to quip something smartass in response, but she was exhausted. She and Mark had waited three hours for Jason’s tests to turn up nothing, only a stern lecture about cleanliness in the home, and then it was her turn to keep waiting. Three hours turned into six and now, after forty minutes of waiting alone in the doctor’s room, she was pretty sure it was the next day. Tuesday. Mommy and Me classes were in the afternoon. 

    “Can you give me some meds and then let me go?” Kelly asked. “I’m pretty sure it’s mastitis, which I’ve had before, and so I can take the meds, and then–“

    “Oh, it’s not mastitis.” 

    When the doctor’s gaze fell on her breasts with a crooked brow, Kelly folded her arms in front of her chest. They were tender, still lumpy, and her stomach flipped knowing that she’d need to feed her son soon. She was lashed with the same sensation of pain as before, and trembled visibly in front of the doctor.

    To her surprise, he stood by her side and placed a hand on her back. He waited with her until the spasm of pain ended, then let out a haughty sigh. “Just as I thought.”

    “What is it?”

    “A rare condition. Your milk has turned to dust.”

    Kelly tilted her head. That was a dream of the beach. That was ludicrous. So she laughed, and laughed, her breasts shaking like beach balls as she did.

    But he repeated: “Your milk has turned to dust. It’s drying up. Are you breastfeeding exclusively?”

    “Yes. In fact, I need to see–“

    “Your son can wait. For you. Because you need to feed him.”

    Kelly opened her mouth to argue yet again that she was exclusively breastfeeding him, but she stopped. She’d come in with pain and this doctor now looked at her like a seven year old who’d lied about breaking something. How was this her fault? She was literally doing everything every last book, pamphlet, and website told her to do. “Well, is there still something you can give me for the pain? Maybe some antibiotics, too?” she asked bitterly. “So, you know, I can keep feeding him?”

    “That’s not quite how it works.”

    “How does it work, then, doctor?”

    “I can’t give you antibiotics like with mastitis. That’s a bacterial infection and can be treated as such to relieve the problem. This is almost parasitic, like a secondary pregnancy infection.”

    “What?” Kelly scanned her very-tired memory for something about this on mommy blogs or even in pamphlets at her OBGYN. So many damn messages about SIDS came to her, but nothing about… “What is this called?”

    “Mother’s Mite.” He held up the ultrasound that a tech had taken of her breast. A spider-like pattern emerged from the nipple and extended back into the breast tissue. It was like the many drawings she’d seen on Etsy with the milk ducts illuminated as if they were constellations. What was the big deal with this ultrasound? It was only as she leaned closer that she noticed the secondary shadow over the center of her nipple the size of a small tack. 

    “Oh,” she gasped. “That is…”

    “A mite, though it’s technically a small organism that is also feeding off your milk.”

    “Oh. No wonder Jason’s been hungry! No wonder…” She ran her hands through her hair, relieved in a way she never had been before. No wonder she didn’t always like feeding Jason. No wonder she didn’t always feel like his mother, like she hadn’t bonded with him. No wonder nursing hurt so much and she hated it so profoundly. She had a goddamn bug living inside of her! 

    Maybe, with it out, she could actually be a good mother. 

    “So you must keep breastfeeding in order to remove the mite,” the doctor explained. “It will keep drinking the milk, drying you up, and not allowing Jason to get any.”

    “So I starve it out?”

    “Not quite. You’ll produce more milk to feed your son.”

    Kelly leaned closer on the edge of the very uncomfortable chair. “I don’t hear anything about the mite dying.”

    “You’re right. It’s going to stay there. It eventually leaves when you stop breastfeeding.”

    “So I could stop now,” she said. “And it would leave?”

    “You should feed your son now. There’s more than enough inside of you to do it. Even with a mite in the way. It’s no obstacle for a mother.”

    “But it hurts,” Kelly said. “It’s weird and he may get a mouthful of dust like tonight. Why should I risk that–“

    “There is no risk. He was sent home with another prescription, remember?” The doctor leaned closer, as if checking her pupils for dilation. “Do you not remember that?”

    “I do. Yeah. I just… want to stop.”

    “You shouldn’t,” the doctor said. He went to his computer screen, turned it on, and filled out her form. Even as Kelly added another pitiful, “but it hurts” he did not respond.

    *

    Kelly had not slept for about thirty-six hours–more than when she first gave birth in the middle of the night–when the dust happened again. She stared down at Jason in his crib with a heaviness in her chest that was only partly guilt. Jason was unbothered by the dust, barely reacting as his mouth and tongue were covered once again. The prescription–which had been with her husband all along–helped ease him of his symptoms, that was true.

    But Kelly’s breasts ached. Her skin literally crawled. And she was so sick of feeling the dust drop out from her breasts, out of her bra, and down onto her feet again. She was so sick of drowning in her own exhaustion and feeding this parasite that wouldn’t let her sleep. 

    The same pain as before seized Kelly’s chest. She gritted her teeth, and like the doctor suggested in a pamphlet he gave her as he shoved her out the door, tried to nurse through the worst of it. 

    Jason was not hungry. He looked away, shutting his mouth full of dust. He slept. 

    So Kelly took matters into her own hand. 

    After expressing dust upon dust, faint milk started to trickle. She’d been leaning over the garbage pail in her son’s room, dumping what was unusable in the trap door for diapers, but now she stopped. Milk flowed like a hose in the left one. 

    Then a tiny, almost imperceptible head popped out. 

    Kelly dropped her breast in surprise and the mite went back inside her breast. 

    She picked up her breast again and squeezed it. The mite popped out halfway. She kept squeezing and squeezing, the skin around her chest turning bright red and her hands tingling with carpal tunnel, but the mite remained stuck. She thought of the ultrasound image and how this tiny tack had attached itself to her ducts, like a damn blocks off a river. With a sudden bolt of courage, she grasped the mite from her breast. She pulled. 

    The pain was excruciating. So much like giving birth, like that ring of fire as Jason’s head breeched her body. She gritted her teeth. She gripped the rocking chair arm. She pulled and pulled and pulled. Tears fell down her cheeks. 

    But once it was out, like with Jason, her body eased and relaxed. 

    Dust flowed. Then milk again. 

    She threw the mite in the trap door of the garbage. She listened to its skittering legs until they, too, stopped.

    Then she did the same to the other breast.

    By the time Kelly went to bed, both mites were now at the bottom of the diaper’s stinking garbage. All the dust had been cleaned up and thrown out, along with her son’s prescription. Formula, stacks and cans and tins of all sorts of bottles and nipples lined the counter.

    I’m going to bed, she wrote her husband to place on his nightstand. Please let me sleep. Feed our boy whatever he wants. Thank you.

    Kelly was about to crawl under the sheets when she remembered the sensation of sand against her toes. That, she decided, she’d actually miss, and so she added: PS: Our next vacation should be at the beach. I think Jason would like it, too. 

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Yellow Painted Room

    Hello! We are almost halfway through spooky season and I’m already having so much fun.

    This next story–much like “Rings”–was inspired by two main events: postpartum with my sons, and the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

    “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the first depictions of what we would come to know as postpartum depression. In the story, a woman is locked away after having a baby, and without any company, she hallucinates that the wallpaper in the room is talking to her (amongst other things). Her husband and child remain on the other side of the room, perfectly healthy and thriving, as she fades away into madness.

    A horrifying story without a ghost at all!

    I had a great amount of respect for Perkins-Gilman before I would walk into my own postpartum hellscape, but she became a lifeline once I was able to recognize what was going on. It’s partly because I was able to recognize it that my story has a more-or-less happy ending. Instead of being institutionalized, or made to feel incurably crazy, I got help and medication (and a divorce, too, if I’m being honest).

    And then I decided to write about my own experiences.

    In my own version of The Yellow Wallpaper, I follow a lesbian couple as they try to decide what colour to paint their nursery. Then the chaos unfolds, and instead of isolation and misery, these two parents get something else altogether.

    You’ll have to read to find out!

    Or listen, since this story was adapted into a podcast by the Creepy Podcast, and can be found on their patreon here.

    The Yellow Painted Room

    by Eve Morton

    Of course, Sasha knew that having a new baby would mean exhaustion. She’d been told by a handful of her friends–at least, those who had kids–that she should stock up on sleep, as if it were onesies in the 0-3 months range or newborn diapers. She’d done her best to nap whenever she could while pregnant, but Sebastian insisted on kicking her bladder or ribs whenever she lay down. Then in the last trimester, perinatal insomnia plus a nesting instinct took over, and she spent most of the time when she should have been sleeping painting the nursery a yellow color that had compelled her from the moment she regarded the hardware store samples.

    “It looks like mustard,” her partner, Dayna, said when she brought home the paint cans and cracked them open at eleven at night. She curled her nose and then gestured to one of the many Our Body, Ourselves type of brochures the midwives had given them on their soon-to-be-son’s nursery shelf. “It looks like the color his poop will be at day four.”

    “Then it won’t matter if he has explosive diarrhea across the wall.” Sasha remembered a story her college roommate Jenny had told her about her baby doing just that; Sasha told Dayna, who only yawned and combed a hand through her curly black hair. “You sure you don’t want to come to bed?”

    “I’m fine.”

    Dayna lingered, her gaze piercing. It wasn’t until Dayna finally left, and Sasha finished painting the rest of the room into the early morning, that she felt the first contraction. She hadn’t slept that night. She didn’t want to sleep now.

    By the time Sebastian arrived, thirty-six hours later, she hadn’t slept in over two days. 

    “Rest,” the nurse said after she’d cleaned both her and Sebastian up. “You will need it.”

    But the midwife, a crunchy woman named Jenny yet again, insisted she breastfeed. Then again in another two hours. It wasn’t long before the departure slip from the hospital came with Sebastian’s clean bill of health, and Sasha was shuffled out the revolving doors and into the yellow room she’d painted only days before. 

    And if Sasha was honest, that’s when the visions started too. 

    The first one was a snake, so plain and simple that she didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about. On entering the room to feed Sebastian, she watched as it bent itself off the wall the moment she crossed the threshold. It then slithered against the carpet, danced between her legs as if she was a charmer, and darted back into the wall on the other side of the room.

    Sasha picked up Sebastian, cooed to him, and placed him down once his cries ceased. The room was dark, the only light from the white noise machine plugged into the wall outlet. But the snakes were still visible: the walls split into ribbons of yellow and black scales, yellow and gold, yellow and brown. The snakes were always some kind of yellow, the same shade as the hardware store sample. They all slithered and danced across the room, coming and going as if this was a station stop. 

    Sasha remained immobile, not in fear, but in a perplexing delight. 

    “I saw a snake the day you arrived.” She told Sebastian in a stilted whisper about the hike that she and Dayna had taken to distract themselves from the reality of the date and the treatments they were both undergoing for fertility. A cat had darted out in their path, followed by a garter snake, and the two creatures fought in the low grass without leaving wounds. They seemed to dance around one another. Like a sperm and egg, Sasha had said aloud. “Then I knew. I was pregnant. With you. And you were a boy.”

    She sat on the floor of her boy’s room and let the snakes come to her. One wrapped around her wrist, then turned to stone. A bracelet. Another, around her neck. Three became rings on her left hand, two on the right. She was covered in yellow, just like the wall, and it lasted until morning when Dayna turned on the light.

    “Have you been sitting in his room alone all night?”

    “He’s here.” Sebastian cried out. “And he needs me.”

    Dayna said nothing as Sasha rose and fed her child. He cooed, even as more snakes came down from the wall, and slithered up both of their bodies. He was impervious to any fear, unlike Dayna. Her face was pale as she watched her wife and son, and all those damn snakes that were made of yellow and nothing but now.

    “Jenny’s coming today,” Dayna said. “Maybe you should talk to her.”

    Sasha did, and the midwife told her all the same things that the brochures said, like she needed to sleep and eat, and make sure she asked for help. “Self-care is important as much as baby care,” Jenny said, just before her face melted into a pot of boiling water before Sasha’s eyes, leaving nothing but a skeleton hollowed out by bones. 

    Then Jenny was gone, and Dayna slipped her shoes on by the front door so she could get them both dinner. “I’d like to bring Sebastian with me,” she said. “So you can nap while I’m gone.”

    “I don’t need a nap.”

    “That’s a lie.”

    “I don’t lie,” Sasha said defensively. 

    Dayna became transparent. Her skin was like rice paper, like the kind they had on their first date. Through thin lips which revealed every single blood vessel in her body, Dayna insisted again. “Nap, please.”

    Sebastian cried and the sound turned into ants flying into the air. Ants had always scared Sasha, ever since her aunt’s house had been invaded by them as a child, and so she finally relented. “Okay. Take him with you.”

    “Good.” Dayna kissed her forehead. She held Sebastian close, his diaper bag at her side, along with her purse. There was more inside her purse than simple errand gear. There was an entire story there, an entire mission kept secret but given away through Dayna’s transparent skin as it flushed red.

    “You’re jealous, yeah?” Sasha said. “I could have the babies, and you couldn’t. That’s what the doctor said. You’ve wanted this whole motherhood trip since you were little. And now you can’t have it, only me. Is that why you’re so mad?”

    Dayna didn’t answer. She’d turned into a statue before Sasha. She reached out to touch the cold stone. Cracks appeared. She sighed and Dayna’s stone facade blew away. She was gone.

    So was Sebastian.

    There really was nothing left for Sasha to do but sleep. 

    Her body felt hollowed out, scooped like the ends of an ice cream carton. She grasped her stomach and folded over onto the front hallway floor. The floor became lava, became fire, became hot against her skin. 

    But the snakes soon came and brought her, as if she was the patron saint of postpartum psychosis, into her child’s room. Yellow bathed her. It surrounded her. And when the walls parted, revealing a life without children, a life without a wife, a life without anything serious on the other side, Sasha stepped forward and through the yellow paint. She left her life, her body a husk on the floor, and she entered another world of sleep. Dreaming. Relief.

    Finally. 

    Then a baby cried. 

    Dayna had returned. 

    The world righted itself. Waves of confusion and irrational anger receded. The snakes were gone, along with stones and the sharp thoughts inside her head. 

    But they would come back, Sasha knew. They would always come back.

    “Hey,” Dayna said from the doorway. “Are you okay? Did you sleep on the floor?”

    “Yes. And yes, I’m fine now. For now.” 

    Sasha wobbled on her feet as she stood. Pain rioted in her body, but so did a tight feeling of healing and regeneration. Her womb contracted. Her baby cried in front of her, and with a smile that Dayna shared, they took care of his dirty diaper and his hunger together. 

    “I think you’re right, though,” Sasha added once they’d put him back into his bassinet, happy and content, their son their son all the way through. “I think we need to repaint.”

    END