Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Thoughts on Motherhood


II. It gets better


Giving birth was the easy part. 

As we struggled to strap our daughter into the car seat for the first time, I started feeling creeping twinges of panic.

Going home.


Why are the nurses just letting us walk out the door with her? Shouldn't at least one of them be coming with us to supervise?

I climbed into the backseat and didn't take my eyes off her.

Everyone who has ever been a parent offers the same bit of advice to first-timers: three little words that seem to encompass every anxiety you are experiencing.

"It gets better."

I couldn't sleep for the first 3 or 4 days. It was all a crazy hormone-induced frenzy of clumsy diaper changes, shocking postpartum bleeding, and trying to maintain my previous level of house cleanliness (impossible, I soon realized.)

Luckily my mother was there to assure me that my crying spells were perfectly normal and to do constant loads of laundry.

As my milk came in, my husband was wide-eyed with delight at my newly engorged boobs. But he seemed to lose interest the first time I showed him how they now leaked milk and required pads.

Night after night I sat awake with my spine curved painfully over her. She cooed and she cried, and I was covered in spit up. Covered in milk. Covered in tears.

Feeding schedule and the 4 a.m. look.

It gets better.

I kept thinking of the scene in the movie "Zero Dark Thirty" where they use sleep deprivation as a method of torture. 

I watch Richard yawn (after getting 6 hours of sleep) and feel uncalled-for anger and jealousy. I yawned even bigger to make it clear who wins this contest. 

I found myself Googling "How long lack of sleep insane?"

Even at four in the morning, covered in all manner of bodily fluids, I still gazed down at her little face and felt joy. It was a tired form of joy -- but still, joy.

It gets better. 

2 comments:

Kristin @ Petal and Thorn said...

used to lurk around on your blog from time to time, and decided to check back in. didn't even realize you had a baby! i know you wrote this forever ago, but you captured this stage perfectly. i was so traumatized by the crazy newborn months that it took me almost 4 years to feel ready for baby number 2.

Linda said...

Being a mother is an awesome feeling. Though the procedure is quite painful and i can understand your feelings, you pain. But, when a mother sees her child, she just forget all the pain she have beared.