I have a baby. Nothing bad happened, I just got busy or lazy or overwhelmed or whatever you want to hear that excuses away why I haven't posted in forever. My baby was born in late February and he's perfect. Well, I think he's perfect. The labor part was pretty awesome considering what it entailed. I only had to endure 9 hours of actual labor and 30 minutes of actual pushing. He came out all gross and crying and he has all his fingers and toes and all that shit. While I wish I had reconsidered who was in the delivery room with me (at one point I opened my eyes and there were 10 student nurses staring at my vag,) I really wish I had known a few things about the delivery and postpartum. Here's a few that no one told me about:
1. Your milk doesn't come in right away. Considering how big my boobs were you'd have thought I could have fed an army directly after delivering. Not so much. Turns out, it takes a few days (sometimes a week) for real milk to get going. So I'm in the hospital pumping and trying to nurse every fucking hour while achieveing .1 ml of colostrum maybe 3 times a day. Yay for the nurse who finally offered donor milk. Also, yay for the badass women who donate milk to help babies like mine get a good start. My milk did come in, but on top of being totally sleep deprived and in crazy pain I added my milk production to the list of things I was panicked about.
2. More than just your vag will hurt. During active labor and pushing I ended up holding my own legs in some fucked up version of one giant, unending lat pull that left me with aching muscles for four days. Imagine maxing out a muscle group and multiply it by 100. That's what it was for me. I was sore as shit.
3. You leak. Out of your vag. For weeks. It's called lochia and it's awful. It's a mix of blood and uterine fluid. So yeah. Ooh, as a side note, the first time you pee after labor is a fucking train wreck. I'm grateful for the nurse who stood in front of me and squeezed water on my vag while I released what can only be described as bloody-acid-hellfire from my bladder an hour after my son was born. Holy shit.
4. Breastfeeding causes uterine contractions. So every time I pumped I got fucking cramps. That's cool, I didn't want to feel good physically or mentally anyway.
5. Men are useless. I don't mean that meanly. Okay, I mean that a little meanly. It's not entirely their fault though. Husband slept through many, many nighttime wakings while I wake up if that baby farts. My friend calls it the mother's curse. Husband also got sick when the baby was only 3 days old. I remember not having slept in 2 days, leaking fluids from my nethers, still crazy sore from labor, blisters on my fucking nipples from pumping and hearing my husband get upset and say "I'm sorry but I just don't feel good." I just wanted to punch him in the dick. But I was too sore to lift my arms.
6. Time moves both quickly and slowly. Every individual day with a new baby feels insanely long. Maybe because it's crazy work taking care of a human who can't even lift his own head. Maybe it's the panic that I won't be able to stop the crying or that I'll get covered in various baby fluids all day. (Spoiler alert, I get covered in various baby fluids all fucking day.) The start from sunrise to sunset can be agonizingly long. That being said, the time as a bulk unit flies by. I remember something came up in May that a friend reminded me about and I scoffed that the event was "months away." No, it was the next week, I just hadn't been present in the non-baby world and had no clue what day it was. I fucking blinked and my baby turned 4 months old. So yeah, having a baby makes for wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey.
I'm looking forward to a day I can wake up and like the body I see in the mirror and not feel like moving to France just to escape the world. Until then, I do have a pretty rad little companion...who just pooped again.
