On New Motherhood
No one tells you what new motherhood will be like. Not really. By the time you’ve reached your turn, your own mother has forgotten the worst parts of your beginning. She’s a grandmother now anyway.
Other mothers you may know could tell you more, if only you knew the right questions to ask. If only you could remember to ask. If only you knew what to anticipate.
For example, no one tells you that you will spend the first night home from the hospital hovering over your sleeping baby waiting for him to display signs of life — the blink of an eye, an involuntary quiver of his lip. You’ll watch his chest rise and fall during the hours he sleeps, hours you should be sleeping too. You’ll hold his little body against your own, your place your ear next to his mouth, you will stand vigil, he will not die on your watch. He doesn’t and you don’t care that you didn’t sleep. You will not care that you did not sleep until weeks later when you wish there was a way to catch up. There is no way to catch up.
Although they say breastfeeding is best, no one will tell you how difficult it is and that most women quit because of the difficulty. It will take weeks, even months to master. You will need to practice it more than you’ve practiced anything in years. Your nipples will crack and bleed, your boobs will become engorged, swelling to a size larger than your baby’s head, you will develop a painful breast infection, you will clumsily nurse in front of strangers and family. And then suddenly, you will get better.
No one tells you that the best part of some days will be the 15-minute shower you take or the meal you ate when it was still hot.
No one tells you that you will sleep in your maternity clothes for weeks because they’re the only clothes that fit and you’ll be too tired to change out of them anyway. You will see other mothers online or in public who appear to never have been pregnant despite the weeks old bundle of baby in their arms. Look away. Be patient. I am not patient, but I am learning how to be kind.
There is no way to describe the exhaustion except to say that anyone who claims to be well-functioning on four hours of sleep a night is a dysfunctional person whom should never be trusted. Not ever, not with anything.
Do yourself this favor. When you get home from the hospital declare that there is no day or night. There is no dinnertime, bedtime, right time or wrong time. There is simply time. It moves quickly when your baby sleeps. It crawls when your baby is inconsolable. You will cherish and squander time. Like the last day of your favorite vacation or the final moments you spent with someone you loved, there will never be enough time.
My own milk leaks through my bra. I will find the disposable paper breast pad on the floor, in my bed, on the counter or God forbid, stuck to my butt.
My scalp is itchy and oily. Dandruff flakes dust the shoulders of my black, milk-damp t-shirt. My hair sheds in strands and gets caught between my toes. Today while changing a diaper, my husband found a strand wrapped around our baby’s leg and his scrotum. I keep my hair tied in a ponytail at all times. I do not notice how my head aches because my nipples ache more.
I remember up to 50% of the conversations I have, probably less. That I am writing this now is a measure of my will and not the strength of my own writing.
These days I feel I can hardly put my words together. Or rather, I can string them together, but I make no promises of making sense. For the first time in my life, my grasp of the English language is clumsy at best. I’ve been a more eloquent drunk.
Twice a day I take an iron supplement, a stool softener, and a fenugreek supplement. Once a day I take a probiotic and prenatal vitamins. I’ve just recently stopped carrying a bidet-in-a- bottle because the stitches I received after delivering my nine and half pound son have finally healed. The only fear worse than a fourth degree tear is having soldiered through a fourth degree tear and needing to use a public restroom. On my best days I am still mildly incontinent, but at least I no longer need to shower after using the bathroom.
By the time our baby boy arrived, one week later than predicted, I’d been leaking a mixture of urine and amniotic fluid for days. I’d spent the week beached, asking my husband for an assist out of bed, off the couch, or into the car. I was nearly too big for restaurant booths and I refused to see movies in theaters without recliners. I dislike the new pick-your-own-Lazy-Boy theaters, but they’d become essential.
Eat spicy foods. Drink cinnamon tea. Stimulate your nipples. Have an orgasm. Walk. Walk. Walk. Your baby comes when your baby comes. The things you were doing before you went into labor didn’t induce your delivery. The time simply comes.
I ate homemade pizza. I drank a glass of wine. I watched Nebraska. I danced in front of my husband. Four hours after midnight my water broke. Twenty-one hours later, I delivered our son.
The events leading up feel significant, romantic even because it is the last time I was her, before I became me, the time before I became somebody’s mom.
You think you are, but you are not a mother before your baby arrives.
For nine long months you are a mother-to-be. Doors are held for you, people ask how you are doing, your emotional and physical welfare are top-of-mind for almost everyone you come into contact. You are glowing, you are beautiful, you are protected.
And then he arrives and suddenly you’re just another lady with a stroller. Nobody holds doors for you as push and pull your stroller from in and out of doorways, walkways or car trunks. You look exhausted, you must be so tired, you should really get your hair cut.
Only three countries in the world do not mandate paid time off for new mothers — Papua New Guinea, Lesotho, and the United States of America.
I am trying to figure out what to do with my life. While clusterfeeding I watched Nurse Jackie and Better Call Saul and I read Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
I am too squeamish for nursing and too dumb to practice law. I am searching for something that will make me happy, something that I will not meet five years from now with regret for having wasted my time, something that I will not leave feeling emptied.
Something for which my son might be proud of me someday.
I am new to this. We are new to this. My husband, our baby and me. All three of us are new to this.
I tell my husband that I do not want to be a single mom living in a studio apartment after he has broken down after I, exhausted, have made an ill-received suggestion from another room. Do not shout at your husband through the baby monitor. No one is happy when you use the baby monitor as a walkie talkie.
No one tells you that at the end of the day, there will be no more room especially no room for touching. Even the most affectionate well- intended kisses can be poorly timed. My breath is sour, my teeth are unclean, my skin smells like my own milk, I am still traumatized by our son’s birth — the vomiting, the vacuum, the blood and the fear. I am tired. I feel alone. I am dancing on the edge of a gaping chasm that continues to widen while our son sleeps between us in bed.
We are new to this. This is hard. All three of us are new to this.
I hold our son and try to memorize his tiny body. His hands, his feet, his face, the hair on his ears, the folds of his skin, the whorl of his hair, his upturned nose, his thin lips, his sideways smile, his eyes when he’s awake, his eyes when he’s falling asleep, his coo.
I memorize his features now the way I once memorized my husband’s features. I am in love again.
I am also my husband’s wife. I am trying to balance my time and my emotions between my two great loves: one new and exciting, one older and enduring.
I am sorry and unapologetic. I am thoughtful and forgetful. I am holding it together and I am falling apart. I am exhausted and my energy is boundless. I am completely fascinating and I am the embodiment of boredom.
I am feeling everything and all at once. I have become me. I am a mother. I am his mother.
