My hands hurt.
She’s in a growth spurt, which means she cluster feeds, which means she’s been on me for two days straight. My body is a location. A set. There’s no wrap time, no one calling cut.
I thought I could do everything with one hand. Walk with her, work with her, live with her. I ended up with carpal tunnel. My wrist gave out before I did.
Now I know: one hand means one hand. It means a life reorganized around a single point of contact. It means I can’t schedule a meeting, can’t commit to anything, can’t tell anyone when I’ll be available because I genuinely don’t know. There is no calendar. There is only her, and the next feed, and whatever I can manage in between.
I know this tired. I’ve been here before. And I’ve never been here before.
Long production days, weddings, commercials — you showed up not quite knowing what you were doing and did it anyway, on instinct, on adrenaline. The exhaustion made sense then. You got paid. You went home.
This is the same exhaustion. A completely different film.
At first I thought I was the assistant on this production. Learning on the job, slow, figuring it out. But this is our set. I’m not the beginner crew member — I’m the director who also happens to be doing sound, catering, and continuity. Nobody’s paying me for this. Directors don’t get hourly rates.
So far the team is three people. One of them can’t talk yet.
We don’t know the deadline. That’s the hardest part. Not the weight of it — the open timeline. You take it one day at a time and trust you’re building something, even when you can’t see the shape of it yet.
I went to the sauna today. For an hour I wasn’t a location. I was just a body that was warm.
We’re still filming.
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.