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    In Pursuit of Change: The Postpartum Mom
    In Pursuit of Change: The Postpartum Mom
    In Pursuit of Change: The Postpartum Mom
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    In Pursuit of Change: The Postpartum Mom

    By Maya Berger

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    About this ebook

    When her joy over the birth of her daughter is overshadowed by complications of depression and autoimmune diseases and she fears she can't balance the demands of motherhood against those of her own parents and husband, Maya decides to investigate alternative methods. In Pursuit of Change is the result—offering encouragement, knowledge and joy to women who might otherwise not know where to find it as they struggle to adjust to their new role.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJun 26, 2017
    ISBN9781543903287
    In Pursuit of Change: The Postpartum Mom

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      Book preview

      In Pursuit of Change - Maya Berger

      Prologue

      If Maya’s dream was to have a baby, why was she feeling so miserable? This was not going according to the plan. Not at all. She was supposed to feel happy and fulfilled. Instead, she felt drained, she didn’t sleep well, she had pain in her joints, and she was constantly sad and weepy, feeling godawful about her relationship with her baby. She felt anxious and wanted that sense of agony to stop. She needed help, but from whom? Was it normal to feel so disoriented, so lost and without any solution to her problems? She was a presenter in the New Energy Relaxation Center for God’s sake. She was the one giving advice to other people about the balanced and peaceful way of life. How was it possible for her to be in this situation? She was doing all the steps she learned in the center. Every day, she concentrated again and again on everything she memorized from those precious intensives she had had with the energy healing Chinese master.

      If you believe, you can do whatever you desire, the master had said. You can get healthy in a second; you can get money, a lot of money, by tomorrow; you can move objects; heck, you can live to be three hundred years old. The one who believes is lucky.

      Still, Maya wasn’t able to feel even a little bit better. She had a wall pressing against her chest, and she felt like someone had taken her guts and made a bow with them. Her guts felt shrunken somehow and drew her shoulders downwards. She felt like an old lady with a lot of pain, both physical and psychological.

      Maya did jumping relaxations in the morning. The practice consisted of jumping in place while listening to music and a voice that was leading the person into a state of relaxation. She also told herself to think positive, not to listen to other people. Every time she went to work and led relaxations, she felt energy go through her body. She asked energy for help, to not feel this huge fear, and to not be anxious. She looked for guidance from her fellow presenters.

      You have weak kidneys, they said. Did you take Chinese remedies after giving birth to your baby? Were you drinking sugar every few hours?

      They said, You concentrate too much on the baby. You should concentrate on energy.

      How? Maya thought. Right now, everything in my life is about the baby. All I do is care about the baby. That’s why I wanted the baby, to care about her. To have my own family. Just a week before the birth, I felt like Wonder Woman. I could do anything. Now I feel like shit. My husband yells at me constantly, my baby wants me to carry her and I cannot, my mum is saying all the wrong things, and at night, I am like an owl. Not because of the baby anymore, because of me and my tight chest.

      Chapter One

      Maya woke up in the hospital. She had seen her baby girl for a moment when she entered the world, but then Maya fell asleep and woke up again several hours later in a room called intensive care where no visitors were allowed, not even husbands. The room was full of women who had just given birth. There were eight of them. They were all chatting with each other. Maya didn’t hear what they were saying, but she thought they were too loud. All Maya wanted was to sleep in her own room, alone, not disturbed. A nurse came and gave her some medicine, then she dozed off again. When she woke up next, it was visiting time for mums and babies.

      It was the first time Maya really saw her baby. She was small, a little loaf of bread. Her eyes were closed, and she looked like she was sleeping. Maya felt a love that she had never felt before in her life. Of course, there were also feelings of excitement, fascination, enchantment—all of them at once, making Maya almost burst from euphoria. She, like all other proud mothers who wanted to show off the object of their fascination, took out her mobile phone and snapped pictures of her precious creature. Then the nurse came and took the baby with her.

      Maya opened her mobile again to admire her baby some more and saw the baby was smiling in one picture. She wanted to turn to the other mothers in the room and show this incredible thing, but she didn’t have the energy to start a conversation with anybody. Still, she thought, this baby is special. No other baby ever smiled so soon after birth, for sure.

      Then she sent the picture to close friends and family. Her dad and her husband, Luca, had surely already seen the baby. They were standing outside the operating room when she went in. And her dad was a friend of the doctor who delivered the baby. They probably took some pictures of the baby themselves, but they didn’t have this smiling one. Maya sent them the picture, knowing that Luca would share the picture with his closest living family, his brother and two cousins. She also sent the picture to her dear friend Tara, who, she knew, would share the picture with all her other friends. She had always done that when someone from their group of friends had a baby, just to make sure that everyone heard the great news. It was easier to brag to them without saying much, just sending the proof of greatness— her smiling baby.

      How are you today, Maya? A nurse came into Maya’s room, carrying her baby. After a day and a half, Maya was transferred to her own room. She had arranged that a while ago during one of the visits to her obstetrician, when her father, a gynecologist himself, accompanied her. She even changed hospitals where she was supposed to give birth because the first one, the one in which her father worked, didn’t have single bedrooms. It was something she was 100 percent certain she wanted. All those horrific stories about the mothers and babies being in the same room, not being able to sleep for even a half an hour because there was always somebody’s baby crying, were too much for Maya. She didn’t want to feel stressed for the first few days of her child’s life. Also, it wasn’t the first time she had been hospitalized, and her previous experience was terrible—from the toilet, which was always dirty; to the conversations, which were often depressive; to the thunderous snoring of some ladies or just one who kept all of them awake at night talking. So she asked her father to take her to the hospital that had single rooms that she could pay for and enjoy her baby in the privacy of their own room.

      I am good, thank you, Maya answered politely.

      Can you get up and go to the toilet by yourself? Do you hurt a lot? The nurse was concerned.

      No, actually, it is quite bearable.

      Doing fine with nursing? continued the nurse.

      I am trying, Maya admitted. She was actually having trouble with nursing. Her nipples were raw and sometimes bloody from nursing. The baby liked to chew while eating, or at least that was what it felt like to Maya. She had a cream that she religiously put on every time she was finished with nursing, but it didn’t help much. All the nurses were telling her the same: Just shove the nipple into her mouth, the whole nipple!

      Maya was shoving her nipple into her baby’s little mouth so forcibly that she thought she’d suffocate the baby. However, it didn’t help. Her nipples started to hurt immensely, and she was hardly able to nurse the baby anymore. She was frustrated because her nipples hurt like hell and her baby still wasn’t getting enough to eat. Nobody told her nursing was such a complicated task. Shouldn’t it just come naturally? There is a breast, and there is a one hungry little mouth. Shouldn’t they just connect and the feeding process begin? In the end, it wasn’t until she had help from her father’s friend, a neonatologist who showed her how to nurse, that she started to feed the baby without pain. The neonatologist told Maya to lie on her side then put the baby beside her on the bed. She tilted the baby’s head in an angle to reach the nipple and lightly pushed her toward the nipple. The merger was made without much force, and the baby started to eat. Maya immediately told Luca to take pictures with her iPhone so she would know how to do it again. It was a miraculous thing, the nursing, after those pushing and shoving moments.

      Most of the time in the hospital, the baby—she didn’t have a name for the first six days; for Maya and Luca, nine months wasn’t enough time to come up with something that they liked and preferred—was in Maya’s room. Sometimes though at night when the nurse came and asked, Do you want me to take her and bring her back in the morning? Maya gladly said, Yes. It was just all so new and exhausting. Even though all she had to do was nurse and make the baby feel safe and secure enough to sleep, it turned out to be a lot of work and required so much energy. Maya thought all the energy she had built and saved inside her through the energy healing sessions would be spent in a few weeks at that rate.

      Then the visitors came. Maya’s proud parents had finally gotten their first and probably only grandchild. She was, of course, extraordinary to them also. Maybe a little less to Maya’s father, who had delivered a few thousand children to this world during his career. Still, he was amazed with his grandchild. Luca’s parents, unfortunately, had already died, but he had cousins he was very close to, and they came to visit Maya and the baby. They were ladies in their fifties, both without children and very excited that their younger cousin had a firstborn. One took a memory card full of pictures, mostly of the baby with one aunt then with the other, baby with mommy, baby sleeping, baby smiling, baby eating, baby’s hands, baby’s little pinky…

      Maya thought she would probably look like a half-dead whale stranded on the beach in those photos. Nobody told her that you actually don’t lose the belly right away. She thought she’d let the baby and the water out and she’d be as thin as she was before the pregnancy. This was just plain weird. She wasn’t pregnant; however, she had the belly of a five months’ pregnant lady.

      Finally, on the sixth day of Maya’s stay in the hospital, she and Luca came up with the name: Luna Dora. They were thinking of calling her Mona, until Maya’s mother said it meant something like cunt in Italian. Most Croatians living in the south spoke Italian, and they used a lot of Italian vocabulary. It originates from the days the coast of Croatia was under Italy’s rule. So Mona was a no-go. Luna Dora stayed because one word meant moon and the other present—a present from the moon. Also, the first one was more modern and worldly, and the second was an old Croatian name.

      After seven days, which seemed like an eternity to Maya, Luna Dora was ready to

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