My daughter was born July 14. By August she had heat rash in three folds I did not know a body could have. The lactation consultant at the hospital had said the words "skin-to-skin" thirty times in three days. Nobody had said: "In August. In a brownstone walkup in Bed-Stuy. With no AC."
My husband bought a window unit on day six. We could not afford it. We bought it anyway. He installed it in the bedroom and not in the living room because the bedroom is where I had been nursing every two hours for forty days and the living room is where he could go to be a person who was not melting onto a baby.
The baby would not sleep unless she was on me. I could not sleep unless she was on me — not for love, although that came, but because every time I put her down she screamed and the screaming was a heat of its own. I had not slept more than three hours in a row in five weeks. I was nursing her, on average, every two hours and ten minutes. I know because I logged it in an app, the way we log everything that does not get paid.
What I did not log was the temperature. I should have. The first heat advisory came August 7. The brownstone got to 91 inside by noon. I sat on the bathroom floor with the baby because the tile was cool and nursed her while the window unit ran on max in the next room and could not keep up. I cried — quietly, so she would not pick it up — for forty minutes. Then I called my mother. My mother said: "I had your brother in August in Manila. There was no air conditioning. We survived." I did not say what I wanted to say, which was: surviving is not the bar.
Postpartum care in the US ends at the six-week visit. After that, the medical system has done what the medical system was going to do. There is no eight-week visit for "your nervous system is fried and your body has not figured out how to thermoregulate while nursing in a heat advisory." There is no twelve-week visit. There is the next time you are pregnant.
I went back to work at twelve weeks. I pumped in a closet that was 84° because the office "didn’t want to spend the budget on cooling a single-occupancy room." The room had a sticker on the door someone had handwritten: "PRIVATE." I added the word "boiling" underneath in pencil. Nobody asked who did it.
My daughter is six now. The brownstone is sold. The window unit is in the basement of the new house, in a box, because I cannot bring myself to throw it away. It is broken. It would not pass a safety test. It is also the thing that kept her cool the first night I slept four hours in a row. I will probably never throw it out. When people tell me motherhood is the most natural thing, I think about that summer and I do not say anything. The naturalness was the heat. The heat almost broke me.
The thing I want to tell my daughter, when she is old enough — and I hope she does not have a baby in August in a brownstone without AC, but if she does — is this: the love is real. The melting is also real. You can be both things at once. They do not cancel each other out. The fact that the system expects you to absorb both with equanimity is not love. It is the heat.