Day 15 — The Circle
Motherhood, surrender, and the quiet understanding that love moves through us
Day fifteen.
Maybe sixteen. Time has a strange texture now.
There are moments when the energy drops so low that even simple thoughts feel heavy. The body moving on instinct more than planning.
And slowly I understand something very clearly:
this is not the time for separation.
This is the fourth trimester.
A time for bonding.
A time when my presence is not optional.
No one else can give my baby what I can give her.
This cannot be delegated.
It is one hundred percent devotion.
And strangely, that realization brings peace.
The nights are fragmented.
We wake every three, sometimes four hours.
If Naomi doesn’t wake me, my milk does.
My body now belongs to a rhythm that existed long before me.
Cluster feeding is something I’m learning to understand. Some days she wants to stay on the breast for hours. At first it confused me. Now I see — this is how she regulates herself, how she tells my body what she needs.
And I am grateful.
Grateful that there is milk.
Grateful that something as simple as my body can calm her.
When she lies on my chest, she settles. My smell, my heartbeat, my warmth — these are her world.
And somewhere inside all of this, another realization quietly arrives.
When I think about how much love I received — from my parents, from my grandparents — it feels impossible to repay.
But maybe I’m not meant to.
Maybe this is how it works.
You don’t give it back.
You give it forward.
My parents gave to me.
Their parents gave to them.
And now I give to her.
Not as repayment.
As continuation.
Love is not a debt.
It is a current.
And right now, my only place in that current is here.
Still, in the quiet moments, another thought appears:
How will I give back?
To Roman — who has been doing everything.
To the people who bring food, who check in, who hold the space around us.
I feel the instinct to repay, to return the love immediately.
But right now I understand something else:
My only task is surrender.
I cannot push productivity into this moment.
If I try to create, organize, or “be useful,” the price later is enormous.
The body takes it back.
So I am practicing something unfamiliar:
letting things fall away.
Resting.
Feeding.
Holding her.
Trusting that this —
this devotion —
is already part of the circle.
This moment is temporary — everyone says that.
But it is also sacred.
So I want to let myself feel it fully.
The exhaustion.
The love.
The vulnerability.
Every emotion.
And then, slowly, I know life will open again.
Energy will return.
Work will return.
Creation will return.
But right now there is only this small universe:
a mother,
a baby,
and the quiet work of continuing love.
The Fourth Trimester is a series of letters written during the first 40 days of motherhood. Not about the baby — about the woman becoming a mother, and everything she is quietly, imperfectly learning to do.