After giving birth to my son, I did not anticipate the “disappearance” of my face. I didn’t look in a mirror during my long labor, obviously not the emergency cesarean, or the day post-surgery. The first time I saw myself—now as a mother—was after limping slowly to the hospital bathroom for my first shower in days. My previous visits to the bathroom had been so laborious, wobbly, and hunched over due to the seven-layer incision in my abdomen, that looking in the mirror had been the very last of my priorities. This time I felt well enough to pause and look in the mirror. I remember the moment distinctly—who I saw was not someone I knew. Yet I wasn’t afraid or sad or angry. I simply didn’t care. My face was no longer my own and it wasn’t important anymore. I spent more time gingerly washing and exploring my cesarean incision than looking at my face. I registered every staple, tape, and dried drip of blood in my memory.
In the following days of early postpartum, I began to see my son’s face in my reflection. That made more sense—he was me and I was him. I saw his face everywhere during those foggy, early days. It was the same sensation as when you look at the sun for a second, and the bright orb gets imprinted in your vision for a bit. His face was everywhere—in my dreams, in the sky, and in my coffee.
My sense of self shifted to my role as his caregiver, and the body parts that I believed helped me fulfill that role best. My breasts, which provided his nourishment and comfort (both of which he sought endlessly), carried more value than my face. My cesarean was the vehicle that brought him into this world safely. My arms carried his body and held him close to me. I only recognized my face when my son looked back at me. In his bright eyes, ease, and joy—there I was.
I’m not sure I fully understood the distortion of self that had transpired when I was in the thick of it. But it’s so clear to me now when I look back at my self-portraits from the first year postpartum. None of my drawings included my face unless it was obscured by a toy or my son’s body or slightly cropped out of the composition. Instead, the self-portraits are details of us breastfeeding, our body parts intertwined, or my cesarean incision or scar. My body was a better reflection of what I was experiencing at that time, both emotionally and physically. Which was not only postpartum healing and mothering but also grieving for a father who died shortly after his cancer diagnosis and navigating the new and isolating normal of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It should be noted that the lack of postpartum support and resources in Western culture encourages the disappearance of a birthing person. They are isolated in their role (even outside of pandemic conditions) and often left to fend for themselves, while simultaneously being judged for their choices. This is a conversation for another time, but I often think about it.
I began to include my entire face in drawings about two years postpartum. But I don’t see familiarity in these. I look at them now and sense the tension of trying to reacquaint myself with my own face. Are these my eyes? No, they don’t look like that anymore. My eyelids are heavier now. During my son’s third year and now into his fourth, that familiarity has finally started to creep back into my sense of self and drawings. The charcoal portrait below is probably the first signal of that transition back to a place of recognition. Yet the composition is ironic given that the profile of my face is layered over my son’s, half of which is peaking out behind mine. It’s the perfect self-portrait for this time in our lives. We are no longer one and the same but are now three people—me, him, and we.
The following passage from MILK by Joanna Wolfarth perfectly captures this sensation and distortion of face and selfhood in early postpartum that I had struggled to pin down over the years. I highly recommend reading this book in its entirety.
“In many cultures, our face is our identity, our selfhood. But early motherhood was, for me, a time of distorted selfhood where I felt truly faceless. For the first five days of my son’s life, I don’t ever remember seeing or sensing my own face. And any physical sensation was entirely centered on the fullness in my breasts, the emptiness of my belly, and the bruising just below. Even when we returned home and I found time to glance in the mirror, my own face was gone, replaced by that of my son.” - MILK, Joanna Wolfarth
Did you experience this in your early days, weeks, or months after giving birth or becoming a parent? Feel free to share your experience in the comments or email me! I love talking about this stuff—our brains, body, and heart are wild.