The Sitting Month

Jiadai Lin examines her relationship with her mother during the first month postpartum—a tender and sensitive time of healing in Chinese culture.

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Days after I gave birth, my mother flew from Long Island to New Mexico to stay at my home. In the blazing heat, she stewed broths that simmered on my stovetop for days at a time. Heat on heat, I’d think as I walked through my kitchen and saw the broth boiling, again. I fanned my thin robe away from my body, sweat sliding from my neck to my belly.

You need warmth in this month, my mother said. To heal.

The month was late July, burning into August, peak monsoon season in the high desert. The month was my baby’s first, a time of jaundice and crusted milk and afternoons napping in bed by the rose bush that tapped against the window screen. And the month was my first as a mother, a time of hormones and reflection and my awe of my own mother, a veteran’s home nurse who had worked overnight shifts for fifteen years to pay my college tuition, who had flown all this way to take care of me. My awe wasn’t in this act, because of course my mother would drop everything to come, but in our newfound dynamic. In birthing my own child, I’d earned a gentleness from her that I hadn’t felt for so long.  

In Chinese culture, the month after a woman gives birth is sacred. Our bodies gradually close up after labor, and it’s critical to protect ourselves from cold forces that could seep in through our cracks.

For years, I was the daughter steering off the gilded path we’d laid together. I’d graduated from law school and earned a well-paying job, living the dream she had for me, but then, I had to leave that job. I had to be a writer. I had to leave New York and move across the country with a boy who loved me but would never buy an engagement ring, who “didn’t believe in marriage” and didn’t believe in being something he was not, a concept that I, then twenty-six years old, was only beginning to understand.

Leave him before he leaves you, my mother hissed from the couch of my childhood living room one weekend as I was visiting. Do not go.

My mother was animalistic when she became angry. Her eyes glowed and her mouth broke open, all teeth and tongue and gums.

I slipped behind the wall to cry silently into my sleeve.

You’re a fool. She continued speaking. I really thought you’d be smarter by this age.

I said nothing back; I never had the will to convince her of my position. For much of my childhood, as I remember, I nodded and complied. But this time would be different, and I would leave my home, falling right off that gilded path and breaking her heart.

***

The month of healing my mother referred to is called zuo yue zi, which, in our native Mandarin, means the “sitting month.” In Chinese culture, the month after a woman gives birth is sacred. Our bodies gradually close up after labor, and it’s critical to protect ourselves from cold forces that could seep in through our cracks.

Stay warm! My mother called as I headed to the shower, or to wash my hands, or to throw out the trash. She relaxed when the windows in my house were closed.

So you’re saying I can’t touch anything cold? I thrust a finger under running water.

Stop that, she said.

I feel fine, I said. Totally intact.

Everything you do now sets your body up for later, she said. You’ll see.

***

She spoke of the sitting month like a new beginning, another chance to be whole again. No matter how broken we already are, we still keep out the cold. We still want to be mended.

***

I was too scared to cut my baby’s fingernails. The infant nail clippers I’d bought while pregnant now seemed hefty and sharp, like they would crush right through my newborn’s nail and into her skin. I handed the clippers to my mother and watched as she worked with the precision of a woman who used her hands for a living. The same hands that found loose veins with the prick of a needle and massaged blood back into the atrophied muscles of war veterans now gave my baby her first trim.

***

I remember being three or four years old and my mother holding up my hands to show a friend. The skin around my thumb and pointer finger nails was tender and flush with blood, scabbed wounds that I’d torn open again with my teeth.

The biting, I’ve tried to get her to stop, my mother said. She won’t listen.

Back then, before we moved to Long Island, my family lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Milwaukee, our first home in America. At night, I would tuck into bed with my parents, under that one bright overhead light, and give my mother my hands. Finger by finger, she would rub Lubriderm lotion into my cracked cuticles, into the open cuts and whitened callouses. She would tell me that I could be a ballerina with these hands, or a violinist, my fingers long and strong like her own. Her voice would ring with a sadness that I didn’t recognize until later, when I hit my early thirties, that melancholy song of what could have been. I would study my mother’s face as she worked my hands, her eyes focused but relaxed, exhibiting so much care, as if everything in my future could pivot on this very moment.  

***

The day after she landed in Santa Fe, my mother turned fifty-seven years old. My partner, the same boyfriend from years ago, bought a Chantilly cake from Whole Foods. I put on a jumpsuit and eyeliner. We sat around my kitchen table and lit candles while I held my baby. My partner took pictures of the three of us, two immigrants and this American-born miracle.  

I imagined a cold breeze that might blow right into my body, how that would damage me forever. How I would never close up, never be whole again. The temptation of it stopped me in my tracks…Who would be more devastated, me or my mother?

The pictures are awkward because my mother and I can’t stop moving, turning to each other, laughing, talking. When I look at them now, I marvel at how happy we look—and we are indeed happy with the simple joy that a baby brings, but the women in the photos look like someone else. Our smiles radiate ease, an unawareness of being photographed; our elbows touch with no stiffness. The photos belie the ways that our history cannot be flattened into a snapshot.

***

My water broke on a Sunday night, a week before my due date. I’d just stepped out of the shower and prepared to watch a show on my laptop in bed. I’d planned to go to work the next morning.  

My partner was in the next room playing a video game. When I walked into the room, about to tell him that I might lie down for a bit and see if this liquid continues to drip out of me, he yanked off his headphones and dropped them on the table. This sudden act jolted me into reality. We hurried to gather our things and get to the hospital.

By the time we were discharged five days later, water had gathered in the ditches by the road to our home. I’d heard the thunderstorms from the room where the doctors monitored our baby’s jaundice. I’d seen the cracks of lightning above the mountains and the fog that descended on our parched town. As my partner drove home from the hospital, I sat in the backseat next to our sleeping baby and studied the evidence of rain. Only five days, and the world had changed. The puddles glistened so brightly from beyond the tinted window that I pulled on my sunglasses.

Our home was left in disarray from the previous Sunday. I walked past our office where my partner’s headphones were still on the table. I saw my laptop open on the dresser by my bed, my little vial of essential oil on the bathroom counter by the shower. A part of me couldn’t wait to set my baby in her bassinet and see how she fit into this little space that I had envisioned for her. Another part of me was overcome with the heavy certainty that life would never be the same again.

***

My mother’s gentleness, it was so new and so familiar at the same time. It was in the way she crept up to me whenever my baby cried, standing two feet away, ready to hand me anything I needed. It was waking up every morning to find my laundry finished, my blood-faded underwear folded into neat thirds, every wrinkle smoothed out. It was in the way my bowls and plates were rearranged in the cupboard, which I knew she had done without thought as to whether I needed such a rearrangement, whether there was such a thing as invasion of space and order between mother and daughter. 

***

When I slid open my back patio door holding my weeks-old baby, I could feel my mother draw in a breath. But she said nothing, and I stepped outside.

My baby was wrapped in a muslin blanket, the skin on her face still pink and delicate from being submerged in our shared liquid. I held her under the shade of an aspen, the leaves flapping against each other and creating little crevices of sun that would land, every now and then, in her eyes. I showed her the blue of the New Mexico sky and the freshness of the pine in the corner of my backyard. I whispered I was sorry that I would inevitably let her down.

It was early August by this time. The water from just a week ago had completely dried up, and the sun bore down on the adobe slab of my patio day after day. Heat ascended from the soles of my feet into my bones and my core. I envisioned the cracks I’d gained from labor, the parts of me that were broken and vulnerable to cold, to force, to unwanted judgement. I imagined a cold breeze that might blow right into my body, how that would damage me forever. How I would never close up, never be whole again. The temptation of it stopped me in my tracks.

Who would be more devastated, me or my mother?

***

I don’t remember the first or last time she hit me. I don’t remember thinking it was unusual. I’d been to China and seen mothers striking their kids out in public while a crowd gathered around the spectacle.

What I remember is sitting in the passenger’s seat on the way home from a junior high orchestra rehearsal. I had confused the schedule and when I arrived and started to set up my sheet music on the stand, it was obvious to my mother from the auditorium seats that I was sitting in the wrong rehearsal. How idiotic I must have been, how oblivious, to be setting up my things in the wrong place. On the way home, as she drove down the long street with too many stop signs leading up to our house and I looked out at the American flags hanging by front doors contemplating my mistake, the blows came. What is etched in memory is the sudden and heavy booms that didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular but just exploded like fireworks in my head. The physical part—the ringing ear, hot cheek, the visceral pouring of tears that surprised me—came later, an afterthought.

I don’t remember holding a grudge, but I remember hating her when her eyes glowed and I was reminded that according to the Chinese zodiac, my mother was born in the year of the tiger.

I don’t remember how many times this happened—at home, in the car, never in public. Enough times that I lost count. But not enough times to overshadow everything else in my childhood. Not enough times for me to even think about it much anymore.

I don’t remember holding a grudge, but I remember hating her when her eyes glowed and I was reminded that according to the Chinese zodiac, my mother was born in the year of the tiger.

***

A few years into dating the boy who would never marry me, while we still lived in New York, we moved in together. He started to witness the phone sessions between my mother and me, the criticism over details that I don’t even remember anymore, and how I would respond yes to every one of her commands and then hang up the phone to hold my head in literal pain, sobbing.

I don’t like how she treats you, the boy said. This is abuse.

I had never thought of the word abuse in my situation. What kind of family would that make us? What kind of mother would that render mine, who spent her rare days off scouring sale racks for the best clothes for my father and me, who never bought any new clothes for herself except nursing uniforms, who would fall asleep on the couch after dinner and wake up just before 11 PM to go to her overnight shift, blinking away fatigue as she stepped into her white clogs, and never complained about it even once?

***

I was twenty-six years old when I called my mother and told her that I was leaving my job and New York. During that time, I sat in a law office in Rockefeller Center for fourteen hours a day and dreamed of New Mexico, all that open space, the mountains that would draw a boundary around my new beginning.

What are you afraid your mother will do? My officemate asked.

I know exactly what she will do, I said. She’s going to yell at me until I give in. I’d honestly rather just have her not talk to me anymore.

My officemate sat with this idea. What kind of person wishes for estrangement from her parent?

But my mother would never cut me off, I said. She loves me too much.

***

Maybe it was abuse, and I could conveniently categorize the way the details live in me. The way I handled criticism so stoically in my twenties—I even sought it out from the law firm partners so I could show them how much I was capable of improving—but in my thirties recoiled at any hint of disapproval towards me from another person. The way I flinched when my mother reached for my baby’s cheek and accidentally grazed my chest. The way she sat two feet away on the bed as I nursed my baby—undoubtedly, she was savoring the moment—but all I could feel was the heat bubbling up in my core, a physical overreaction to this minor invasion. Giving it a name doesn’t do either of us justice.

***

Eventually, after I bought my one-way ticket and gave notice at the law firm, after my visit to my childhood home during which her eyes glowed and she called me a fool, my mother came into the city to help pack up my apartment. She moved about my home like an acquaintance, someone here to complete a service. She carefully stacked my dinner plates into boxes, layering towels between the ceramic, and gave me polite instructions—take those clothes off their hooks; place those shoes in the plastic bags. Her eyes never met mine for more than a few seconds.

It hurt to know that I was right. She loved me too much to let me go. She loved me too much to not let me go.

***

During my sitting month, my mother handed me a stomach band. I recognized the pink-and-blue striped fabric as something she wore back when we lived in Milwaukee.

It’s to suck yourself back in, try it. She turned towards the bathroom mirror and squeezed her hands into her waist. Like it never happened.

Like what never happened? I wondered.

My pregnancy and labor?

Our past?

Later, behind the privacy of the closed bathroom door, I slid open the window inside my shower. There was no cold breeze, only an influx of dry heat. The way it met the steam, the air almost sizzled. It was impossible to tell which side was more of an intrusion on the other.