@stillbecomingmama: the dark is not a metaphor and i want to say that plainly because i think we have made it into one and the metaphor lets people who have not been in it imagine they understand it from the outside. surviving the dark sounds like surviving difficulty or surviving a period of challenge or surviving the kind of hard that language can hold at a comfortable distance. but the dark i am talking about is a specific physical fact. it is the actual absence of light in an actual room at an actual 3am while an actual baby needs something from you that you are not sure you have left to give. it is not symbolic darkness. it is the dark that your eyes have learned to navigate over weeks of this, the dark you know the texture of, the dark that has its own sounds and its own quality of air and its own particular weight that is different from the dark at 2am or the dark at 4am when morning is starting to feel possible again. this dark. the 3am specific one. and surviving it is not a metaphor either. surviving it is the real physical act of being in it and continuing. feed and rock and cry and try again. not because you have found a reason to. not because morning feels reachable. just because the continuing is what you are doing and so you continue. and every light on that map is in the actual dark tonight doing the actual surviving. not the metaphor version. the real version. the one that does not get easier to describe from the outside because it cannot be reached from the outside. you know the one. you are in it. and so are all of them. #postpartum #newmom #postpartumsupport #momtok #momlife
