Month: February 2019

all posts

scribbles from lucid dreaming (aka notes at 1am)

Cally
person uses pen on book
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Sometimes I have really weird thoughts and mental chats while I’m in and out of sleep. Here is the most recent collection of them.

Perhaps a professor

who undergoes research bouts

or collects sources to ribbon together

as fact of experience

to craft my own thoughts.

And derive the privilege to explore

the world outside clinical confines or

academic walls.

A touch of freedom

the taste of travel

wanderlust, I presume.

Reconnecting to the artsy

the book-infused

the sociological side of life.

 

The outdoors:

lightness of being from sunlight,

dappling a chimera city that I call

my “for now” home.

 

Strokes on my baby’s head, soft

her languid, lazily opened eyes driving into content sleep

Nostalgia or nosferato?

Blood sucking I am used to; blood is freely given.

Time is stolen.

Breastfeeding love despite sacrifice of time.

Excited to share the world.

 

Smell of burning firewood during campfire piles reminds of

familial community aching,

but absence filled by anecdotal and perceived noise.

 

Raising a baby alone by internet,

but wary of lapses in previous generation.

 

Wanderlust of mind and eyes.

Sunlight glow within:

“a love of things that grow”

“everything the light touches.”

all posts, community, women's health

on matrescence

Cally
selective focus photo of woman carrying baby
Photo by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi on Pexels.com

This is a quick blurb from the women’s health field (a field I find endlessly fascinating).

If you follow news in the field of maternal health, you may have heard the term matrescence thrown around in the last year or so.

Often defined as the transition of a woman into motherhood, it has also been likened to going through adolescence again, mom-style, due to the fluctuation in hormones, the rapid changes in the body, the newly forming identity of oneself and one’s place in society, as well as changes in one’s day to day life. Alexandra Sacks, a psychiatrist, wrote a piece in the NY Times called The Birth of A Mother that covers a bit why this transition is so powerful, but often overlooked as society focuses on the baby and ignores how momentous of a change it is for the mother.

This lack of conversation around the realities of becoming a mother has been suspect in being one of the many factors that contributes to postpartum depression, as a mother may feel she is supposed to be estatic about her newborn baby, without expressing any negative emotions despite the magnitude of change her life has just undergone.

In effort to mitigate that mental divide, allowing mothers to express all their emotions, and to create recognition in society about the magnitude of change motherhood is, many companies, academic institutes, and individual professionals are researching and producing more information about this time, working to get the message across. Another huge player in the field is the clinical psychologist Aurélie Athan, whose focus is on reproductive psychology. She looks at both striving and struggling moms in order to normalize the transition to motherhood and continues to work to revive the term and meaning of matrescence. She has even worked on getting some of the first academic concentrations and graduate-level certificate programs created that focus on reproductive and maternal wellbeing because she recognizes the importance of getting health providers, activists, and others involved in the spread of awareness about matrescence.

So if you are a new mom wondering why you feel so off, so different, and how to deal with these feelings of ambivalence towards your new life, know that you are not alone and that you should definitely speak up about how you feel. It will help cultivate a culture of acceptance around our motherhood adolescence.

all posts, miscellaneous, the eczema body

healing skin, hormones, and hot nights

Cally
fire wallpaper
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

It’s currently 3am and I’m awake despite the little one actually having been asleep since 830ish.

“Why on earth are you awake?”, you may be asking yourself, and rightly so.

Well let me tell you, internet reader. I am hot.

Now though the ambient temperature in the room feels cool, I know I set my thermostat a bit high (in my defense, with the skin disorder I’m usually always freezing, and the baby likes it warm too). However, I am not sweating. I’m just really warm. Warm enough to sleep in just a t-shirt and underwear, which I haven’t done since before my skin declared mutiny on my body (circa 20013?).

So as I’m over here pondering my existence in a semi-lucid state at 3 in the morning, the question that keeps popping up on the forefront of my mind is: this heat, what does this mean?

What does this mean? I’ve got a few theories.

  1. My skin has shown an unprecedented amount of healing lately. I have soft skin on my face, stomach, back, and thighs. Perhaps I have done the majority of my topical steroid withdrawal pemance and am finally seeing the results, aka having skin of normal thickness and elasticity and with the ability to retain heat and moisture.  Maybe. Or, maybe,
  2. I have finally hit the point where, despite still breastfeeding (which can delay this), my hormones are kicking back in, and I am soon to rejoin the ranks of menstruating-aged women. In which case, hormones could be the culprit for my heated sleep body. Or, perhaps,
  3. My circadian rhythm is so butchered from having to wake up at all manner of times during the night shift for the last 7 months (more if you count pregnancy months too) that my body doesn’t know what to do with un-externally regulated sleep interruptions, and so in a desperate attempt to keep its new status quo, it’s driving me awake via continued thermoregulation fluctuations. Maybe that’s it.

Or maybe it’s some culmination of the three of those things because as is often the case with complex systems like humans, we don’t always have a simple solution.

At any rate, I’m enjoying the fact that my little one is getting so much sleep, and that I’m getting some silky smooth patches of skin. I’m not stressed and as I am awake I am making sure to hydrate, so I’m sure in time I’ll learn to sleep again. So c’est la vie et bonne nuit (that’s life and good night).