In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s oxtail guisado from novelist Cleyvis Natera.
For an entire week, I’d been lying as still as possible, sitting upright only to breastfeed my two-month-old baby girl, Penelope. Any time I moved, sharp rays of pain slithered up my lower back, radiating so intensely I had to clamp my eyes and mouth shut just to keep from crying out. My two-year-old son, Julian, took notice. “Did that baby hurt you?” he asked, chunky hands caressing my cheek.
“No, Penelope didn’t hurt me,” I reassured him. “Mommy hurt herself.”
My predicament was not labor related. In fact, I’d been stunned by how quickly I’d recovered post-C-section. Just a couple of weeks earlier, I had been flushed with an energy I never experienced when I gave birth to my son. It was with this renewed vigor that I’d come across a barrage of headlines about the singer Ciara’s post-baby body transformation. She had “snapped back,” returning to her pre-baby weight with lightning speed.
I was used to a strong, fit body. Not long ago, I’d completed a marathon, and had even finished a few triathlons. Now, after my second child, there was a softness, a broadening of my figure I didn’t want to accept. Outside, it was late summer and through my great room’s street-facing windows in Montclair, New Jersey, I saw athletic bodies glowing golden, midriffs exposed in a blur of motion. I considered the remaining 12 weeks of my maternity leave. Why not reach toward a better-than-before-the-babies, celebrity-level body? I, too, could diet and take advantage of the extra caloric deficits from breastfeeding. I, too, could tackle intense workouts and shred the baby weight. So I ordered a DVD set for an at-home workout and decided to have my own snap-back summer.
Eating nothing but grilled chicken and lettuce for most meals, I made it all the way to day five when an overly enthusiastic burpee halted all dreams of a svelte physique. Upon flinging my body into the air, I realized something had gone terribly wrong. My husband carried me to bed. I’d pulled my back out; after a couple weeks of rest, it would heal itself, my doctor assured me.
While I recovered, my mother agreed to stay with us. I knew what I craved, and she’d anticipated as much: Within an hour of arriving, a familiar, piquant aroma wafted from the kitchen. My mother hummed an old bolero song as she cooked, and the combination of her voice singing, “Besame, besame mucho,” and those sweet, tomato-laden vapors felt, at the time, more potent than any painkillers I’d been prescribed.
The scents and sounds transported me back to the Dominican Republic, my birthplace, to a time when my 10-year-old body climbed up the side of our simple concrete house easily,