Seth Lind (8:45)
During my first pregnancy, I I kept a log of all the weird things that happened to my body. Beyond the obvious ones like a growing belly and swollen ankles. These changes were random and sudden and almost sinister, as if my body was messing with me just for the fun of it. My gums bled. I broke a tooth. My boobs began to itch from the inside. Varicose veins sprouted all over my legs and other places too. The pinky on my Right hand clicked each time I bent it, and my right foot, and only my right foot, was always hot. There were some nice things that happened, too. My horrible acid reflux disappeared, and the back pain that I've had for five years also stopped bothering me. When I read this list to my doctor, he told me that everything I was experiencing was perfectly normal. He explained that some of the symptoms were so the fetus could better leach the nutrients, calcium and blood out of me and into it. The other ailments were because my body was breaking itself apart so that it could eventually extrude a whole other body. Then my doctor said, after the delivery, all the pregnancy hormones that made me so pliable and scrambled would leave my body and my bones, joints, organs and muscles would find their way home again and lock back into place. Most of the things on my list would disappear, but some things might remain. Among everything on the list, it was my back pain, rather the lack of back pain that I wished would be a forever thing. I had tweaked it in my 20s during a move, and for five years it kept me from doing basic things like tying my shoes without sitting down on the floor or even leaning over the sink to brush my teeth. Pregnant, even with a massive belly and jello legs, I could lower myself onto the floor to squat without my back giving out. It would be amazing if the pain never returned. My doctor said that was unlikely. But my mom actually had a whole theory about how exactly to keep my back pain away. She told me I should actively take advantage of the window of time right after I gave birth, before my body locked back into place. She wanted me to to do postpartum confinement. The word confinement sounds worse than it actually is. Technically, you are not actually confined. There are no locks or constraints, which is extraordinary when you hear how draconian the rules of confinement are. According to traditional Chinese standards, no cold foods, including cold beverages, no spicy foods, no strong flavors, and no deviating from the strict diet. No bathing, no washing your hair, no open windows or air conditioning, no leaving your home, no bare feet, no exercising, no housework, no reading, no tv, and absolutely no crying. And you have to do this for at least 30 days. This kind of methodical postpartum bed rest is actually pretty common in many cultures where new moms receive a lot of help, especially right after birth. So obviously not in America. And the promise of confinement in Chinese culture at least, is that at the end, not only will your body heal from the delivery, but if you really do it right, you can guide your body back Together in a way that's even better than before you were pregnant if you do it right. Then, my mom told me, you could fix your back. It didn't have to be that bad, she said, especially if you got rid of the outdated rules invented before germ theory and indoor plumbing. I could wash my hair and watch tv. Still, no, I wasn't going to do it. I had always found confinement to be sort of offensive. Treating a woman as a delicate, breakable, incapable doll seemed insulting. I considered myself to be the exact opposite. Frankly, I was surprised that my mom was so into me doing confinement. She raised me to be independent and nonconformist, just like her. She insisted that I should always have my own bank account, even as a fourth grader. That as a woman, I should always be loud and precise at everything I did, that I shouldn't just go along with a thing just because everyone else was doing it. The result of all of this is that now I am a stubborn person who loves to believe I'm right, especially when it contradicts common sense. Here's an example. My whole life, I never exercised and was even kind of proud of it, even though doctors and physical therapists told me my back would never fully recover unless I did. But there was just something so uncool about doing little squats in my living room or spending $30 on a Pilates lesson. $50? How much is Pilates? My mom is like this too. She refuses to look at maps because she's made a decision that she can't read them, which is absurd because she's an accountant who also once edited engineering manuals. Anyways, my mom admitted that she had been skeptical of confinement, too. She'd actually skipped it the second time she had a kid, my little sister, something she eventually regretted. According to mom, the benefits of confinement were a mystery until she tried to go without. I should save myself the trial and error and just listen to her. Of course, I didn't listen to her. I gave birth via Emergency C Section 10 days after I was due. When a nurse admired how quickly my wounds were healing, it activated the overachiever in me, and I became determined to prove how talented I was at healing. When the doctor said she wanted to see me walk around the hospital ward once in the next 24 hours, I did it three times. When she told me to wait two weeks before bending over or climbing stairs, I did it as soon as I got home. I felt all sorts of messed up, but also proud of myself for being able to do it. Plus, my back was miraculously still pain free. There's actually a video of me on my first day back home with my newborn in my arms, lowering myself onto the concrete sidewalk so my greyhound could sniff my kid's head. I posted this video on Instagram and I remember beaming with pride as more experienced moms commented squatting already. Meanwhile, my mom was side eyeing me passive aggressively, urging me to sit back down, to put socks on, and to quit drinking so much cold seltzer and drink some bean porridge instead. It took two weeks for my back pain to return and when it came back it was so much worse than it was before I was pregnant. I had to lean against the walls to walk down the hallway and often found myself stuck on the floor, flat on my back, dialing my husband, who was on the other side of the house, for help. I figured out a way to leverage my baby out of his bassinet with a baby blanket and a hinging movement so I didn't have to bend over when I was picking him up. It was infuriating. It was bullshit that my pain had come back even worse. It wasn't just my back. My pelvic floor was barely functioning. My C section scar continued to burn for months after my surgery. Taunting me was the fact that I somehow grew half an inch as evidence that my body had changed in a measurable way, just not at all in the way that I wanted it to. I had happened upon a magical window of opportunity and completely whiffed it. I had been given a chance at getting better and instead I'd used this time to get even worse. Fast forward four years and I got a second chance. I got pregnant again and like before my back pain disappeared, I wasn't going to mess it up this time. So I set up the guest bedroom for my mom and cleared my calendar for 30 days. I figured the first day would be the easiest. After all, I was in the hospital. I would wear socks and rest as much as I could. My first test of willpower was one hour after I gave birth. A nurse offered me ice chips, which I declined, against the rules, but a parade of medical interns kept showing up with ice water. Do you have room temperature water? I would respond in a saintly and goodly way. By the fourth or fifth time, I began to mutter my question through a scowl, asking for my disgusting lukewarm water. My husband would absentmindedly swish his own bottle around and the ringing peels of ice against metal sounded like the beginning of an argument to me, which was if you're keeping track, also against the rules. My doctor told me I had to do two laps around the ward before I could be discharged, which also bumped up against confinement rules. So instead of pushing myself to do more, I pushed myself to do the bare minimum. I took my first lap nearly 24 hours after she had asked, and it took me nearly 30 minutes to complete the small circuit. At home, my husband played with our 3 year old while my mother showed me that she had stocked the kitchen with special confinement food overnight oats, hard boiled eggs, blueberries and raw cashews. There was a crucible of baba feng, a porridge made of red beans, jujubes and goji berries that would help me replenish my hemoglobin count. The taste was pleasant and mild and I was to have it anytime I was thirsty, which was constantly. I ate my weird spread of nuts and fruits, porridge and eggs like some kind of storybook bear who lives inside of a cottage and found myself oddly satisfied. Maybe confinement was less like a prison and more like an omakase where you give yourself over to the will of the sushi chef for the sake of your own enjoyment. I had been worried about how I would manage all the sitting. At first I had the TV on all the time playing in the background as a matter of habit, but then I found myself going hours without paying attention to whatever was on and just staring at my sleeping baby without thinking about anything in particular. I felt pretty proud of myself for all this nothing. I had eaten vats of beans. The couch had a me shaped dent in it. I never even thought about my back. It never bothered me even once. I must be healing so well. And so one day during the second week I decided to pick up all the toys on the floor of my son's room while my baby napped. And then I decided I wanted to go see what it would look like if I moved the lamp from the left side of the kitchen to the right, and then what the bookshelf would look like if I separated the nonfiction from the fiction. I snuck a mini ice cream cone and ate it in one bite and then ate four more. My mom noticed me puttering around the house and told me I should go sit down. I rolled my eyes but went back to my perch on the couch. Later that day I went to the bathroom and noticed that I was bleeding more than usual and the color was off. I took my blood pressure and it was higher than it's ever been. I found my mom who was napping with the baby and I told her I didn't feel good and that I was scared, which made me feel worse and even more scared. And so I started crying because I was like, this is it. I have internal bleeding. I have preeclampsia. No post eclampsia. I'm bleeding out. I thought I was rearranging some books when really I was signing my own death certificate. I panic, called my doctor, and while I was on hold, I used my mom's phone to call my sister, who's also a doctor, and everyone told me that the bleeding was fairly normal. As for the elevated blood pressure, I was likely just having a panic attack. I suddenly realized how fragile I was, both physically and mentally, which was a new thing for me to accept. I had hated the idea of confinement because it meant being treated like a weak and broken person. But that is what childbirth does. It breaks your body. Practicing confinement acknowledges that truth, which I was discovering is a much better option than ignoring it. I returned to my couch divot with a new resolve. Two weeks later, I was officially done and dun dun confinement worked. My back felt great. My C section scar was almost totally healed. Compared to my first time, my body was working a thousand times better. The biggest change in those 30 days, though, wasn't to my body. It was to my mind. I was calmer and happier, but I was also less stubborn. I had new proof that sometimes it did make sense to just go along with the thing everyone else was telling me to do. So a few weeks after confinement ended, when I felt the tiniest twinge on my back that would usually signal the beginning of another bout of horrible pain, I tried something else. Instead of just taking Advil and hoping it'd go away like it used to, I signed up for a physical therapy workshop and started doing little squats in my living room. Old Connie would have never done this. I'm still doing them a year later. I tie my shoes with ease and brush my teeth. No problem. So shout out to my mom in Chinese confinement. I bow down to both of you and I don't even have to hold on to anything to do it.
