There is this little mercurial creature hanging around my house and we don’t speak each other’s language but we’re learning. My emotions twist and turn with every involuntary grimace on his face. I am his huckleberry. The hardwiring is intense. I get caught up in the brutal cycle of wondering if I’m doing an OK job and asking myself, “Is my baby happy?” The latter is a crazy question. What does that even mean — a happy two-week-old? This kid is pure id and I am trying to define him with psychobabble and read thoughts into his searching blue-brown eyes. It’s exhausting.
We have moments where everything clicks into place and feels natural, and other moments when I am overtaken by sheer terror. Terror that I won’t be able to comfort him this time, terror that I am not giving him everything he needs and deserves, terror that I am never going to feel normal again, terror that my nipples are going to spit rivers of blood if I have to put his mouth on them one more time. I posit that breastfeeding a newborn every two hours is, cumulatively, more difficult than giving birth naturally. But maybe I’m being dramatic.
The hormone roller coaster is brutal and sometimes lays me so low that I just sit there and rock him, sobbing, wiping tears off my face so they don’t drip onto his. Two minutes later it will be as if nothing happened at all, the storm clouds far on the horizon. Chump storm clouds. It’s bizarre and irrational and I try to take my lumps in stride because I know it’s normal.
Everything is so different now, wonderfully and terribly, and no amount of preparation would haves sufficed for the degree of difference. I am waddling around in a body that I don’t even recognize as mine anymore, one whose extra folds of skin are tattooed with these angry swatch marks that are supposedly going to fade, but I have my doubts. I can’t fit into my old clothes so I just lounge around in sweat pants and nightgowns. That’s a recipe for depression right there, hormones be damned. I got so sick of sitting around yesterday that I did some mild exercises, only to realize later that I shouldn’t have because I’m still rife with relaxin and I apparently hurt myself. So today I am hobbling around because my pelvis aches like a sumbitch. I want to go for walks but the weather is shit and we’re still not quite ready to get out and about, especially around people. If it sounds like I’m a complaint factory, it’s because I am.
Ups and downs are the name of the game. You get kicked off the horse and get right back on is all. I anticipated this phase would be tough to handle and sure enough, it is. But you just get through it, every parent tells me. You just survive until the kid begins to resemble a little human more than a demanding little floppy lump of flesh. Of course, I love my demanding little floppy lump of flesh beyond words. I hope that goes without saying. I’m just venting. I need to be able to do that sometimes.
I remember this all too well. Heck #1 just turned 4 and I still have days like this. While some of it is “normal,” there is a veeeeery fine line of it being something more. And that in itself is “normal.” I think we feel like we have to take the weight of our family on our shoulders… making sure everyone else is OK and have all their hearts desire at the expense of our own sanity, well-being and overall self-image. But we HAVE to take care of us too. Hormones and stress and sleep deprivation take us on a crazy rollercoaster of depression and doubt and guilt. It’s so very hard to slow it down or stop it. It is OK to ask for help, to admit these feelings of being utterly (or “udderly” when you are nursing or pumping) overwhelmed. It doesn’t make you less of a mom in any way. In fact it makes you better and stronger to recognize when to ask for help. Isn’t that what we strive to teach our kids anyway? If we want to be there for them to lean on, we sometimes have to share the weight of things by leaning on others ourselves. Hang in there! And call me. I don’t want you to fall off like I did. It wasn’t a happy place at all.