In Confinement by Courtney Chatellier

On a morning in October whose most distinguishing trait may be how closely it resembles so many other mornings during this repetitive yet unprecedented time when I’m newly a mother, I’m walking down one of the quiet blocks that stretch between Ditmars and the highway, my baby strapped to my chest in a stretchy gray sling where for the last hour, each time I think he’s asleep, he starts to twist around and cry, and my contact with the world around us closes like a latch. There’s no one else out on the street, only the blank faces of the brick houses cut from the same pattern like strings of paper dolls watching us from both sides, and in front of me the branches of a tree arching down to eye level, each exquisite red-orange leaf outlined by the white glare of the sky. As I get closer to I try to focus: on the leaves, the sky, the smell of the air. I’ve been reading a book that advises me to expand my sensory awareness at moments of overwhelming stress. But it’s like seeing the world from underwater, like looking up at the sunlit surface while breathing through a mask.

My mind keeps skidding back and forth between the number of hours a newborn should sleep, according to all the books (twelve to sixteen: perfect, even numbers, like blocks you could stack), and the sum of the odd, jagged shards of time that my baby has actually slept in the last twenty-four hours. Walking with him is a gamble, a prayer: when we’re getting ready to go out and I lower his legs into the sling, he often screams like he’s in terrible pain, and I make my heart stand still, cleaving to the idea that the crying will pass quickly, that he’ll be asleep by the time we reach the second floor landing, or else the front door, or after walking two blocks, lulled by the motion of my body, and I’ll be able to come up for air, to see the leaves and the sky as though actually outside and not trapped within an invisible ambulatory cell. 

On this morning in October he’s eight weeks old, and this is what motherhood is like: like wandering in a desert, and also being afraid of drowning. For the measureless time that it lasts, I have no language for it. But in March, New York City goes into lockdown, and all around me I see people who remind me of those early newborn days, the face masks and rubber gloves providing an iconography for that purely internal state of being cocooned from the world and yet newly susceptible to it. When I walk through our neighborhood now, and someone guardedly crosses the street—to protect herself, or to offer protection?—I think about how we are all like new parents, at once trying to adjust to an utterly changed reality, and wondering, with our own mixtures of grim calculation and magical thinking, when things will go back to normal.

*

When I start seeing it in the news, describing places all over the world in various states of lockdown or restriction, I think about how the word “confinement” once referred to the time a woman spent in labor. This usage is becoming obsolete, and there’s something almost euphemistic about it, as if childbirth is primarily an experience of enclosure, that it happens out of sight. 

The Oxford English Dictionary locates the first uses of “confinement” to refer to childbirth and the postpartum recovery period in the middle of the eighteenth century. This was also the time when male physicians started to attend deliveries in England and its colonies, a development that was met with some resistance: in 1760, a midwife named Elizabeth Nihell published a manifesto opposing the entry of men into the practice of midwifery. The historian Judith Walzer Leavitt observes that the transformation of birth into a medical event over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the “growing separation between expert and layperson, between obstetrical specialists and birthing women,” made women turn increasingly to hospitals to have their babies as they placed more and more faith in capital-S “Science,” so that “by 1960, outside of some isolated rural areas, it was almost unheard of for American women to deliver their babies at home.” So “confinement” might be a description of the way that not only individual laboring women, but the phenomenon of childbirth itself was becoming cordoned off from everyday life. 

Once, extended networks of female relatives and friends helped deliver babies and take care of new mothers. But already in the nineteenth century, those intimate communities were being strained by the demands of industrialization. Without a network of other women to help with older children and housework, certain women started to look forward to a hospitalized delivery as a vacation from otherwise ceaseless domestic work. Leavitt quotes one woman who told Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1950s: “I can’t tell you the relief I feel as I walk out my door headed for the hospital to have a baby … I have nothing to worry about … and have only to concentrate on giving birth.” By the 1960s, women who gave birth in the U.S. typically stayed in the hospital for two weeks, and in many places forty days—the quaranta giorni from which quarantine derives its name—was the standard length of time for postpartum “lying-in.” 

“Confinement” probably also sounds dated because of how little expectation remains that a woman will stay confined to her bed or her home for any length of time after giving birth. The standard hospital stay for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery is forty-eight hours in the U.S., which is the only industrialized nation that guarantees zero days of paid parental leave, so that about a third of American women don’t take any time off from work after giving birth. In contrast to this official denial of the body’s need to recover after giving birth (1), the significance of forty days as a milestone of postpartum recovery lives on in the standard practice of the six-week check-up, the first and typically only postpartum medical exam, which is also famously the day when a woman might get her doctor’s blessing to get back to her “normal” activities—which seems to be code, in everything I end up reading about it on the Internet, for high-intensity cardio and penetrative sex, since most women have already gone back to work by this point (2). 

Today, childbirth and the intense period that follows bear little resemblance to that event that was known for centuries as confinement. But having and caring for a baby remains an encounter with confinement in all of those other, ordinary senses of the word: an experience of restriction, of limitation, of being kept in one place. Even as I log miles through our neighborhood on those desperate walks with an insomniac baby strapped to my chest, I’m still always in the same place, confined to the tight, binding cell of his needs, so powerful because inseparable from my own desires. Each time that I’m away from him in the early weeks, a stopwatch starts running, the gnawing need to hold him and breastfeed rising like the room is slowly filling up with water. The urgency of meeting his needs is propulsive even, or perhaps especially, when apparently impossible, and in the hours I spend failing to lull an overtired baby to sleep, I watch my ability to control and orchestrate my own life disintegrate around me, and yet it will be months before I understand that it is precisely this loss of control that produces the acute sensation of panic that has become so pervasive that for months I forget it’s even there. 

*

The word “quarantine,” and the idea of a period of waiting, cut off from the world, as a rite of protection and healing, is seven centuries old. On its website the CDC explains that in 14th-century Venice, ships arriving from cities where plague epidemics had been reported had to wait forty days before disembarking—hence quaranta giorni, hence quarantine. But the spiritual or magical associations of forty days are, of course, much older: forty days is the time that Moses spent on the mountain, before returning with the word of God. It’s also the time it rained during the Biblical flood, the time Jesus spent in the desert, and the length of lent. In other words, the duration of waiting, of the inner calculation of sin and meaning, of spiritual and physical renewal. 

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, as in the practice of medicine, the forty days are often a period of solitude or of strictly limited contact with others, so that there’s something private, even impenetrable, about what happens inside. The rules that govern ordinary life are suspended, or a new set of rules replaces them. Structurally, quarantine resembles a black box, the term in computer science for an entity that performs a complex operation, but whose inner workings can’t be observed. You can see what goes in, and you can see what comes out on the other side, but what happens inside the box remains mysterious. You go into your box—or your arc, or the desert, or the hospital, or new motherhood—and you disappear for a while and then, as if by magic, you emerge forty days later, healed and redeemed.

At least, this is what I once believed. Before I have a baby, labor is a black box: I can imagine the trip to the hospital, and I can imagine coming out again, holding a baby, but what happens in between cannot observed or understood. And yet I somehow believe that once we’re home again, the whole unfathomable process will be behind me.

As it turns out, when I leave the hospital I find myself in another box, one whose boundaries are never clearly defined. Initially, I have an unexamined and, as it turns out, extraordinarily naïve belief that by the six-week check-up, I’ll have fully recovered from giving birth. When at four weeks postpartum I still have such dramatic swelling that I’m scared to look at myself in the shower and start Googling phrases like “uterine prolapse,” a midwife at the hospital where I delivered tells me over the phone not to come in until my six-week check-up, because what I’m describing will almost certainly “resolve itself” by then. It is then that I realize that not only will I not be “back to normal” at six weeks, but I might never be, and for a while I find myself saying over and over in my head, as if to some imaginary legal counsel, that I still would have wanted to have the baby—I just wish I had known what it would truly cost. 

The realization that time, and my body’s relation to it, are not subject to my will, takes longer to arrive. 

*

What’s so familiar to me, in the first weeks of New York’s lockdown, is the way that time itself has changed. Having a baby marked a first rupture with clock-time and calendar weeks; in the city’s quarantine, time again seems to lose its familiar shapes. Pamela Douglas, the author who encourages me to cope with stress by expanding my sensory awareness, explains that before having a baby, life follows “the metronome version of time: productivity maximised, schedules adhered to, punctuality a priority, days micro-managed, hours commodified.” Time with a baby, by contrast, “is a time of not producing much.” And yet, she argues, this “baby-time” can also be “a time of enormous renewal and creativity, a time in which you hit the ‘reset button,’ a kind of personal dreamtime into which you dip whenever you are caring for your little one. The metronome version of time disappears for a while, and stretched, flexible time plays out around you. The hours repeat themselves in spirals and circles, in slow ebbs and flows.”

For several months, I sit in bed in the evening waiting for the baby to go to sleep, the room pitch dark, the white noise machine set to a volume slightly louder than the ocean during a storm. In this black box of a room, he nurses and dozes off, nurses and dozes off, until finally he seems to be asleep, like really asleep, but if I try to put him down, he jerks awake with a slow, creaking wail. It’s like a wrong move in a board game sending me back to Start. I get back in bed, start nursing him again, wait for his body to grow heavy and for the rhythmic sucking to taper off. I try putting him down again. Sometimes it works, he stays asleep, I slip out of the room. Sometimes he wakes up again and after three or four of these cycles, it begins to seem like I could be stuck there indefinitely. Outside the dark roaring sea of the bedroom there is dinner, TV, the possibility of having a conversation with my husband. I am holding a human being that I made with my body, I think sometimes, waiting for time to pass, and yet this longing can easily flip over into grief that this phase will end one day, and in those moments baby-time feels like a secret that has finally been revealed, as though clock-time was a spell, a façade that I can now see through, and I never want to go back.

And yet at other times the desire to return to that world of ordered time and neatly measurable things is just as strong. At some point I find myself entranced by the promises of baby books with titles like Twelve Hours’ Sleep By Twelve Weeks and What No One Tells You, all of which seem to capitalize on the desire not to be swept away by baby-time. With slightly varying ideas about how long it takes to get back to normal, these books are uniformly chronological in structure, with the baby’s birth marking the beginning of time, which is thereafter counted in weeks. Infuriatingly but also seductively, they imply that each week of the baby’s life is, or should be, or can easily be, a decisive step forward in the march towards full nights of sleep and the achievement of a calm, reasonable baby who eats and takes naps like a reliable train rather than a summer rainstorm. That by studying a chapter with a subsection called “Changes to Be Made During the 8-12 Week Routine,” you can reinstate the law of clock-time upon the primordial chaos of baby-time. That outside of the apocalyptic rupture with clock-time that having a baby represents, the normal world is still there, waiting for you.

*

I returned to that world, or thought I did, on January 27th, 2020. I was on paid leave from the university where I teach for five months—a small fortune of time, for which I was grateful, even as part of me clung to its end date like the promise of reaching dry land, of stitching my new life to the life I’d been living up until having the baby. On the first day of class, my students introduce themselves: “Hi, I’m Jin. I’m from China. I don’t have The Virus.” “Hi, I’m Cindy. I’m also from China. I don’t have The Virus either.” Outside of a single province in China, the coronavirus is still a meme, a punch line. A couple of weeks later, when I turn on the classroom projector, I notice that the university’s home page is dominated by a notice about the novel coronavirus, which still doesn’t seem real. Its importance seems like it might be a trick, an optical illusion of a never-ending news cycle. My students’ attentions flicker towards the screen, and then flicker away, unconcerned. While they write in their notebooks, I check my phone to see if the babysitter has sent any pictures. My confinement is officially over, but I don’t really feel like I’m back in the world yet. My classroom is glass on two sides, on a high floor of an office building in downtown Brooklyn, and makes me feel like I’m in some kind of spaceship. It always seems less-than-real, and also vaguely unsafe, like I’m actually sleepwalking and could at any moment wake up to find myself somewhere else.

By early March, emails arrive from the administration in which contingency planning is discussed, but still cagily, and with heavy use of the subjunctive mood, grammatically holding the inevitable in abeyance (Should it come to pass that in-person classes be suspended…). I’ve adjusted to being away from the baby in the afternoons to the extent that I no longer feel myself start to lactate in the middle of class (a surprising, hot pain, like I’d been invisibly cut open and blood is dripping out). And yet as soon as we all stand up to leave, I still get an adrenaline rush, the desire to hold the baby flooding back into my body like a narcotic, like lust. Transferring to an already-full N train at 34th Street, I force myself into the dense forest of bodies. Once I’m home, the baby giddily tearing at my shirt, the world stops heaving. 

This is what back-to-normal is like, in that brief window between two confinements: I’m either leaving, or I’m coming back. The opposing currents of baby-time and clock-time like two planets. I pass back and forth between their orbits.

*

On March 9th, the student newspaper discovers that the university is planning to close after all—just for a week, tacked onto spring break. The official email comes a few hours later. Classes will proceed as usual through the next day, and then we’ll switch to “remote instruction.” Elated, I think it’ll be like those overcautious public school closings for blizzards that never materialize. I imagine another stint on maternity leave, the scope of my orbit narrowing again, just for a while.

Then the city enters confinement, and life slides into reverse. In-person classes are suspended another week, and then through the end of the school year. Now that I’m home full-time again the baby, who has been weaning, wants to breastfeed all the time. At some point he stops sleeping through the night. Then he starts sleeping like he’s four weeks old again. If those five months of maternity leave were a staggering towards some imagined point of normalcy, the passage of time seems to be ferrying me once again into the chaos of baby-time—except this time with an unreal overlay of virtual work-time, as my husband and I trade off between childcare and Zoom teaching. As it did when he was first born, the world contracts: we’re either inside our apartment with the baby, or taking walks in our neighborhood with the baby. There are no bars for one of us to escape into for a couple of hours after bedtime, no option to have a babysitter come over so that we can go somewhere together and try to talk about anything except the baby for the duration of a meal. As we watch the number of known cases and deaths rise nightmarishly through April, we often talk about how, strangely, the life we are living in our re-narrowed, private world is basically unchanged. With the important difference that now, it is all there is. 

*

In its interruptive power, in the way that it is so private even as it is so shared, lockdown-time is the uncanny mirror image of baby-time. Now, as the world has come out of one phase of lockdown or entered a new one, we are all in confinement, a box from inside of which there is no knowable end or exit. The hours repeat themselves in spirals and circles, in slow ebbs and flows. Coming out of those five strange, suspended months of maternity leave, I expected to find the world where I left it. But that world turned out not to be the eternal structure I once believed it to be: like clock-time and other measurable quantities, the certainties of the pre-pandemic world have proven to be surprisingly fragile, less like laws of physics than like myths that do not hold up well to the exigencies of the body, which refuses to live or die or heal on schedule—no matter what pressure of individual will or government mandate is applied.

Now, when my baby takes naps in his crib—which he does, most of the time, as though it is the easiest thing in the world—I climb out my bedroom window onto the fire escape where, under countless layers of paint, the words engraved on a narrow metal plaque are still legible: “Anyone placing any encumbrance on this balcony will be fined ten dollars.” From up here, I can see into the backs of moving trucks double-parked on the street below, where it seems like everyday someone is loading cardboard boxes and large, abstract pieces of deconstructed furniture, heading for some other place, getting out. Finding somewhere more spacious to quarantine. Or maybe abandoning the idea of waiting altogether, and simply moving on to the next part of their lives. I can hear the crackling sound of the baby monitor, propped up behind me on the windowsill, but I can also see, in the clarity of the late-spring air, the people walking on the sidewalk below, the unusually light stream of cars passing by, the new green leaves of the tree that grows to the height of our building. For whole fistfuls of time, I am close enough to the baby, and also far enough away, that the world moves into focus again. 

1)  For comparison, Sweden provides 480 days of paid parental leave, every country in Latin America and the Caribbean provides at least twelve weeks of paid maternity leave, and most African countries provide twelve to fourteen weeks. According to a 2014 study conducted by the International Labour Organization, out of 185 countries surveyed, Papua New Guinea and the U.S. were the only ones that offer no paid leave to men or women.

2) If they haven’t given up their jobs indefinitely, as 43% of mothers do, whether because the cost of full-time childcare would effectively cancel out their income, or because each hour at work is an hour wrested from time with an infant who doesn’t yet know that you are a separate person—from a person you too might not feel separate from yet.

Courtney Chatellier teaches writing at New York University and holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She lives in Queens.