It’s been almost 2 weeks since we brought baby home. It feels like 10,000 years. I have to admit, I don’t love the newborn phase. She is very demanding and gives nothing back. Not even a smile! It is getting a little easier as we are learning what to expect. She has her Screaming Hour(s)™ but is actually a pretty decent sleeper once you get her down (which……can take a while. She’s gassy). We get the 3-hour stretch sometimes. What a dream!!

The first few nights were pretty terrible. She cried and cried the first night and we just didn’t know what her problem was. We still don’t know what her problem is half the time but at least we don’t take it as personally. When you’ve never done this before it feels really awful, like you’re doing something wrong.

I also had that irrational fear that if I stopped looking at her she would die. I basically just stayed up all night glued to the video monitor so I could make sure she was still breathing (not that I would have known what to do if she stopped breathing). Luckily we have supportive parents nearby. Bren’s parents came by in the middle of the night to keep watch and my mom came the next night. I was able to actually sleep for a few hours with them in the house keeping tabs on things. Now that we have successfully kept the baby alive for several nights in a row, I find it much easier to sleep.

We did have an issue early on where she didn’t poop for like 5 days straight. The pediatrician was of course concerned she wasn’t getting enough to eat and recommended feeding her expressed milk in addition to breastfeeding. We did that but still didn’t get any poop out of her—we took her in and she looked OK, she wasn’t dehydrated or jaundiced. One infant suppository later, we had all the poop we’d ever wanted. 😛

She was still gaining weight kind of slowly so they still wanted me to supplement in addition to breastfeeding. It’s pretty frustrating because I nurse, get the baby to go back to sleep, pump for at least 20 minutes (and do all the associated clean up of the bottles & pump components etc) and by the time that’s all done it’s time to nurse again and start all over. This would be fine if I didn’t need to sleep or eat. It’s also a big challenge to time everything correctly. If she wakes up early or takes forever to go down, the entire process is ruined.

That’s what I’ve found most challenging so far: the irregularity and randomness of it all. I am definitely a creature of routine, even if the routine sucks (e.g., getting up every 3 hours to nurse). The fact that sometimes it’s 3 hours, sometimes 23 minutes, sometimes 4 hours (except it shouldn’t be because we’ve been advised to wake her up to eat which is THE WORST OF ALL) is really difficult. I’m trying to roll with it and remind myself that it’s temporary. I am SO grateful that I get a full 12 weeks of parental leave from work. I have a great deal of respect for people who do this AND go right back to work. I may be in a daze but at least I don’t have to go anywhere.

Of course, not going anywhere (or doing my own thing) is its own problem. I feel an odd loss of identity—or, a temporary substitution of identity where I am just a milk producer for this ravenous little creature. A lot of my activities were curtailed by the pandemic and/or pregnancy (a lot of my working out/dancing became impossible) so I’d already been feeling a little adrift before baby came. Physical activity is also really good for my mental health so this “try to avoid stairs” recovery regimen has been really difficult, especially when you add postpartum hormones on top of it (that shit is REAL and CRAZY). I’ve been making sure to get a daily walk in—all the way around the corner and back!—so at least I’m moving my body a little bit.

It’s funny—I feel like I’m not being productive enough because I’m not working on any of my personal hobbies etc. I realized how silly that is when I considered that I’m busy with taking care of a new human being. I think that’s pretty worthwhile. I will eventually return to the stuff I liked to do (or maybe find new stuff I like to do) and I’ll even be able to indoctrinate my lil mini me into it. It’s just been such a big change from basically exclusively worrying about myself (and to some extent Bren :)) to exclusively worrying about the baby.

I just don’t want to wake up one day and realize it’s been 5 years and all I’ve done is watch trash TV on TLC. It’s fine for now as a temporary thing to occupy myself while I’m pumping at 3am. I guess the fact that I’m worried about that in the first place (hopefully) indicates that it won’t happen to me.

Other than all that, I’m pleased to say that so far I’ve been doing great at showering and changing my clothes every day. 😛 I can definitely see how people go days without doing that in these circumstances. It’s easy to forget.

Sort of Funny and Sort of Scary

Two things from those early nights:

Every time I checked the video monitor in the middle of the night I was lowkey scared I would see a creature or ghost near the baby. I was also afraid I’d hear voices in the white noise machine we have in the room. Clearly, I have watched too many horror movies.

I like to sleep holding onto a pillow and because I am a grown-ass adult my pillow happens to be a giant pug plushie named Puglas. The first, or maybe second, night I woke up and FREAKED OUT because I thought I was clutching the baby and had suffocated her. I literally jumped out of bed and started going over to the nursery…as I started waking up I realized that I wasn’t holding the baby, it was just Puglas, who doesn’t need to breathe.

Lactivist Propaganda

I am struggling with breastfeeding, I do not enjoy it, and I resent the big push for breastfeeding ONLY and SCREW YOU if you don’t want to do it. I took a 3-hour breastfeeding class that was basically 2 hours about the supernatural properties of breast milk, 55 minutes about why you should quit your job and stay home to exclusively breastfeed your baby for at least 2 years (and I mean exclusively—you shouldn’t even put expressed milk in a bottle) and about 5 minutes on how to get baby to latch.

At no point did anybody ever mention what happens if you can’t quite make enough milk or otherwise aren’t some instantly natural milk mama goddess. In fact, the only problem they usually mention is engorgement—like OMG you’re gonna have SO MUCH milk you won’t know what to do with it!

I have access to the internet (and I talked to my mom friends) so I know that low supply is VERY COMMON and that’s exactly why it annoys me so much that breastfeeding advocates seem to try to keep it a secret. I guess they don’t want people to be deterred from trying it. But I’m doing everything I should be doing (nursing and pumping constantly, I even got into the homeopathic shit like consuming fenugreek and oats and flaxseed) and I feel like I can barely keep up with baby’s daily needs. I’m still not in a place where I could pump a bottle for Bren to take over one of the feedings…which is something I desperately want to do.

I don’t feel bad or guilty or broken, just annoyed. Don’t sit there and tell me about the how magical, wonderful, easy, and natural breastfeeding is when you know damn well tons of people struggle with it.

A Random Thought

I miss Boomer a lot. But I’m glad he went before baby showed up. I can’t imagine caring for a geriatric dog who could barely walk on top of caring for a newborn baby. I’m sure he would have been very cute with her, though.