It’s Friday night, G’s settled into bed and here I am spending an intimate evening alone with my computer. Tonight I actually had a really great night, I went to my sister’s house and she hosted a bunch of our friends over for dinner which was fantastic. I love not having to cook when I get a chance, not too mention the fact that today it was well above 30 degrees so too hot to cook! We all spent the evening talking, eating and laughing and best of all G wasn’t the only baby there. Our friends were there with their 2 week old baby girl. She is so adorable and so precious…it’s incredibly hard to believe that G was that small only 5 months ago. He’s twice her size now and I tonight I just sat back and looked around and wondered where the time went and how we all got here, I never would have been able to imagine this place I’m in now a year ago.
Right now I am adoring motherhood at this phase that G is in now but I feel like I was completely gipped out of enjoying the newborn phase because of all the complications I faced postpartum. Nobody could have possibly prepared me for how hard the first month of motherhood would be but I still feel annoyed that nobody even tried. I was prepared for the lack of sleep, one thing I did know about babies is that they didn’t sleep a whole lot at first in spite of what you read in books. But one thing I was completely unprepared for was the wrecking ball that childbirth would take to my body. My labor for G began with induction number one on a Monday morning and induction number three on Tuesday morning which put me right into hard labor. G was born 24 hours later on Wednesday morning after a vacuum, forceps, an episiotomy and some fourth degree tearing wreaked havoc on my body that I would have never expected and nobody even tried to warn me about.
Nobody told me that little babies often have their days and nights mixed up and so for me the first month (and beyond) for me postpartum involved a period of absolutely no sleep a wicked infection in my incision site, finding out I would need reconstructive vagina surgery, mastitis, and holes for nipples created by the power of my infant son’s sucking. Nobody told me that I would spend the entire first month of my child’s life in a horizontal position on the couch uncomfortable wearing a shirt and unable to sit down…Nobody told me that it would take me awhile to feel like my son was absolutely worth all this pain. I love him now but I didn’t know that I would spend the entire first 6 weeks of his life crying and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into and whether I could really do this on my own. 5 months later I am happy to report that things are moving along splendidly and I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of this motherhood thing (a statement which I know is ridiculous given the ever changing roller coaster ride that motherhood has already proven itself to be). One thing I am extremely proud of is the fact that I am breastfeeding almost 100% of the time a feat which even the lactation consultant and la leche league leader were incredibly impressed with given the damage to my breasts and the fact that G had/has at times an insatiable appetite and it’s not uncommon for him to want to be attached to me every half hour. No one prepared me for the fact that breastfeeding is a LOT of work, I had no idea how much dedication it would take.
I am always amazed though at how much this experience seems to bond me to other women. Other more experienced moms will see me with my baby, look me in the eye and ask me how things are going. In the beginning they would reassure me that things will indeed get better. Now I find myself looking into the eyes of other new moms and telling them that things will indeed get better. Babies and the ability to mother is in my opinion a gift straight from heaven, but it is certainly not for the faint of heart. There is nothing glamourous about a time of life where you’re puked on, pooped on and peed on all in a day’s work but at the same time when I look down into my son’s eyes and see him smiling up and me with a look of pure trust, when he coos and giggles away at me, or pushes himself off my breast after a night time feeding with his lips pursed and a look of utter contentment on his face my heart fills and my throat swells and starts to close and I feel full in my love for him. The payback of these special moments make it all worthwhile. Nobody tells you about that feeling either, atleast not in a way that you can understand it until you yourself are a mom.
