The Deprivation Tank
May 2nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I remember reading in a psychology class at some point in my life, about a man who stayed awake for a week straight. A few days in he began to see spiders crawling on his arms and started flicking them off. Days after that he went into full mental breakdown. Hypothesis, a person will go crazy without sleep. Conclusion, YES.THEY.WILL!
Logan had two amazing nights of sleep. Six hours. SIX HOURS, which in the baby world is amazing. I reveled in my six hours of uninterrupted sleep. I had dreams and they were good dreams. Not just the crazy half awake half asleep dreams. You know the ones where you’re doing chores around the house only to wake up and find while you are tired from doing a load of laundry, when no effing laundry actually got done.
For the past week or so, my little sweet baby boy has been sleeping for 3 hours and then for one hour stretches for the rest of the night. This means I get about 3-4 hours of sleep each night, which means I am a horrible person to live with. Oddly enough, it seems the more irritable I get, the more quality time he wants with me. Mind you, he doesn’t want to be held or to hang out and talk about the cool dream he just had, rather he wants to eat and use me as an over sized pacifier. I have no interest in being a pacifier. I spent good money on actual pacifiers to free myself up from that type of employment. I have reasoned this with him, but guess what, he is not interested in reason.
Today I’m grouchy. And not the cute kind of sitcom-y grouchy that makes for quippy sarcasm and a full laugh track. I am the kind of grouchy that wants to punch you in the baby maker when you make sarcastic comments about me needing to get use to not sleeping for the next 20 years. Lack of sleep and a crying child will do that to even the best of people. There is a reason why Mother Theresa didn’t have biological children, otherwise she would just be plain ole’ Theresa.
I love my child, he is an easy child and I feel blessed that he spends most of his time sleeping, smiling and eating. There are however moments when he let’s out this monstrosity of a cry that hits a certain pitch which makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It’s in that moment I believe he is trying to break me down so that he can rule our household. I’m not talking the way in which he already does, I’m talking he wants to tie his parents up in the closet and order pizza, which he will loudly gum to death on the couch while watching rated R movies in his diapers.
Having a child is like surviving a hazing. Just when you are pushed to the brink of tolerance you find another plateau within that you never knew existed. The first week home from the hospital I vividly recall staring at my reflection in the mirror wondering who the crazy lady staring back at me was. Even on my hardest of partying nights, I never looked that disheveled. Now I was expected to look at myself looking that horrible….sober! My skin was pale and clammy, my stomach churned with acid and my stomach looked like a helium balloon four days after the birthday party. That moment was my first plateau. I truly felt I could not go on. I could not continue to care for this child who seemed to never sleep and wanted to eat every hour. But I survived, each night got a little better than the next and soon I hit my stride and felt that we were settling into a nice routine. AND THEN IT DIDN’T…
Paul thinks that maybe we should just let him, “cry it out.” I would love to think I had that sort of endurance. The kind that allows you to tune out your sweet child’s ear piercing rain dance screams and ignore the pins and needles in my boobs that are pooling with milk with every cry he releases.
But on days like today, just when I am contemplating escaping to Mexico and changing my identity, Logan wakes up and he flashes me a cute little grin and makes a little this little, “agooooo” sound that I am powerless against, and the dance starts all over again.
Welcome to the Jungle
April 24th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I’ve sat down to write about my first 7 weeks of motherhood at least ten times. Nine out of those ten times I was called away by an angry customer, upset their lunch wasn’t ready or that they pooped themselves for the second time in a row, and the other times I literally fell asleep while typing, I know this because the sentence went something like this, “Motherhood is amazing in so many ways and exhausting in so many otherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr3opruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuosfdlgh….”
Needless to say for someone who thought, “how hard can this be?” The universe is punishing me for being a pompous self-righteous jerk. Weeks ago I was nine months pregnant, balancing like a hippo on the back of my couch while precariously hanging hand-made curtains. I was running to Ikea picking up a mirror two times heavier than anything I had any business lifting and then hanging it over my couch. These are both tremendous tasks mind you, when your belly hits the wall before your hammer does. I reasoned that if I could remain stubborn and self-capable throughout my entire pregnancy, nothing would change a great deal once Logan entered this world.
And then he entered this world.
On March 3, 2012 in the wee hours of the morning, after trying as best I could to push a very unwilling and unyielding baby out of my lady parts, Logan was born after an anesthesiologist, OB and several nurses went in to get him. My suspicion that he was inclined to take up permanent residency in my uterus was correct. After 9 or so hours of labor the doctor told me that while I was 6cm dialated, the baby was still lodged somewhere between my throat and my chest. What started as a routine trip to the hospital for monitoring because he was a week past his due date, turned into a Pitocin hazed, unmedicated flurry of pain and hell. My hope for a non drug, no c-section, no Pitocin labor turned into a trifecta of everything I never wanted. It ended with me crying under fluorescent lighting in a stark white room with a team of 10 medical professionals and my husband all gazing at my exposed lower regions which were swollen, dimpled and glowing under horrible lighting as Logan was born via c-section.
The next few days are a blur to say the least. The first night I stayed up most of the time staring at Logan in his see through plastic hospital bed, watching his chest rise and fall, convinced that my staring was the only thing that was keeping it moving. Then there was breast feeding, which was more an exercise in torture and make-believe. The nurses assured me if I put him to my breast he would get colostrum, which from the best I could gather was invisible fairy dust that only he could see. Breast feeding is just as magical as they say, if magic is a nail that is gently driven into your boob. I cried and agonized over breastfeeding, worried I had already failed as a mom because I couldn’t produce any sort of liquid to provide my baby nourishment. I felt broken; worried that I missed some sort womanhood right of passage thinking maybe I just stood in the Period line and didn’t see the Magic Milk Lady line. I always hated lines.
Luckily, by the third day we struck oil, and while it was in limited supply…we had milk people! It was around this time I began mourning the life my boobs once had. Regretful they had never seen Spring Break, that they had never earned any beads, sad they had never gotten a free drink at a bar or flashed a passing truck on a road trip. I had taken them for granted when they were free to live a reckless life. Now, almost without warning, they were adults and they had adult jobs to do, like provide nourishment and be man handled by tired nurses who treated them like raw bread dough and a baby who sucked them like he was the nozzle of a Hoover vac.
No one talks about breastfeeding when you are pregnant, no one prepares you for the Boot Camp of Breastfeeding. One thinks it is natural and easy, but let me be the first to tell you it isn’t as easy as polar bears make it look on the Discovery channel. Your cute fuzzy blind baby doesn’t clumsily nuzzle up to your breast and begin suckling while you are none the wiser eating a mulberry bush. Your adorable, sweet, innocent new baby reluctantly and recklessly chomps down on your breast with the same clumsy way a junior high boy does the first time he goes up your shirt to tune into Tokyo, and with the same jaw force as a Great White Shark.
Breastfeeding is not easy. I never expected that my first try would set me on a 6 week journey through pain, fire, infection and tears…but if you are able to stick with it…it does get better and once it does, it will be night and day from the start.
The Final Countdown
February 16th, 2012 § 2 Comments
It’s a cruel trick society plays-the belief that pregnancy is 9 months. Pregnancy isn’t in fact 9 months long, it is 40 weeks long. Which, if you do the math correctly, works out to be 10 months. 10 long months.
Then, just when one wraps their head around 10 months of nausea, elastic waistbands and the inability to see ones toes, you find out from a doctor that pregnancy is often times longer than 40 weeks as most first time moms deliver at 41 weeks. Which leaves an emotional, sleep deprived, achy and swollen woman left with trying to muster the will to lug around 5 additional weeks of pregnancy.
I understand the longer my baby stays in my belly the healthier he presumably will be. I know that science says he knows when he is ready and once he is, he will come. But you know what science, I’m not convinced. I am not convinced that my baby knows the way out. Two weeks ago he seemingly “dropped”. My belly which was tight and round turned into a low man gut overnight. This morning however, my belly appears higher. The only reasonable conclusion, my baby is confused and thinks up is actually down or he believes the way out is through my nose. I, for one am horrible at directions. Even with GPS I manage to take the wrong turns and often where I expect ocean, instead I find mountains. I think it’s reasonable to think poor directionality is hereditary.
I stopped kidding myself. Since week 37 I have monitored every ache and pain, wondering, “Is this it?”. I have tried to picture my water breaking, convinced myself that the back pain is the prelude to earth shattering, cervix opening contractions. But my back pain is nothing more than back pain, my cramps are nothing more than cramps and my due date is beginning to look more and more like a sham.
I no longer expect this baby to come. Instead I’m convinced I will be the first woman in history to get pregnant in her thirties and continue to be pregnant with the same child in her seventies. Never have I wanted an inhospitable uterus more than now. I can only imagine that instead of inhospitable, my uterus is like a carnival. Inside me, my baby is listening to a bluegrass band while eating corn dogs and cotton candy. It is a beautiful summer day and he has all the time in the world to people watch, ride the ferris wheel and attempt as many times as he wants to win the biggest stuffed animal at the ring toss. He is going to find a girlfriend, attend the University of my Uterus and then he is going to get married and start a family of his own, ALL WHILE STILL INSIDE MY BELLY!!!
I have a doctor appointment today. I am prepared for her to tell me that I am still pregnant, there is nothing happening to show progression of labor and that I am still fat. I also expect she will ask if I can sign my body over to science as she has never seen a woman with such a low probability of ever delivering her baby.
