28 Elul: Eight Weeks Postpartum

Eight weeks postpartum with my first child—an unlikely miracle, given that I’m 42—I watch my daughter wake in the dawn light. She arches her back extravagantly and raises her arms high above her head. Later, she slumps heavy on my chest, napping. Later still, she brushes her fingers back and forth across a nubbly blanket. Throughout the day she drinks hungrily, burps loudly after crying, passes gas as she looks in my eyes and smiles. She doesn’t know how to shrink. She inhabits her body to its limits and there meets the world unfolding.

“Make your body your home however you please.”

Eight weeks postpartum, this message appears on my screen. Despite the physical marathon of early parenthood, I still live largely inside my head, its walls made of my worries and doubts. My daughter helps me see the meagerness of this. She helps me recall how the world unscrolls—slowly, dramatically, astonishingly—when I step out from under the shelter of my fear.

“Make your body your home however you please.”

Eight weeks postpartum, I look up and it’s Elul. The Hebrew month calls for teshuvah, return, and carries us into Rosh HaShanah, the birth day of the world. Suspended between birth and rebirth, I hear a new kind of call: 

Come back, the call says. Come back, be at ease, be at home. This is your birthright, the call says. To be, unshrinking. To be, in yourself and in the world.

Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner is a climate change chaplain, educator, and innovative spiritual leader. The founder of Exploring Apocalypse, she helps individuals and communities across faith traditions explore the spiritual disruptions, invitations, and reorientations of living in a time of change.