​Post-partum plus illness is amazingly raw and bewildering. Everything changes around me, friendships and family relationships are shaken up and recast like fortune telling bones. All my predictions were wrong. I live entirely in the moment, my joy is unsullied by any memory of sorrow, my guilt hot with anguish, my despair a heavy coat of ash I can’t breathe through. I doubt myself endlessly and let it go, over and over. 

There are few words, my mind is a storm of ships floundering, there are few words and fewer moments of calm in which sentences and narratives can form. I miss the clarity. I dream of ships sinking, in my dreams I follow the bubbles back to the surface although everything is inverted around me. In my dreams I cannot speak underwater and wish I could tell the others this wisdom – to follow the bubbles back to the air. 

I should be sleeping. I should stop crying and sleep. The infant and I mirror each other – over tired tears, craving the comfort of touch. I keep failing but I do just enough to not sink. It will have to be enough. It will be enough.