Some thoughts on motherhood

I love my son more than I could ever hope to even begin to express. I felt a strong overwhelming sense of something for him from the day I found out I was pregnant and all the doctors were touching my shoulder and telling me they were sorry and we could try again in three months. He is a fighter and I respected him for that.

While I love him, it is only recently that I fell in love with him. I am a smart woman - I can do fractions and stuff, but even still I had an idealized notion of what is a mother and what is parenting. I knew it was going to change our lives dramatically. I knew I’d be tired. However, television shows and movies and Hallmark cards all make it out to be this state of bliss. It is not. It is freaking hard work. Being a mother is the hardest thing I have ever done. Hands down. Nothing even comes a close second.

There were days, no weeks, where I was convinced we weren’t bonded. That he doesn’t really love me and I blamed myself. I blamed myself because I had a c-section and allowed them to give me morphine, which meant I couldn’t go to the nursery to see him. We were separated for most of his first day. He latched on and nursed well the very first time – in the recovery room before they whisked him away. When he finally came back we struggled. Why? Because no one explains that breastfeeding is hard. And it is harder still when your baby is jaundiced and wants to sleep and the nurses just want to shove a bottle into his mouth. Hard, I’m telling you.

All they tell say about breastfeeding is that the first few hours of your child’s life is incredibly important because that is when you will bond with them. How is that even possible? You have no idea who is the tiny person. He don’t know you. All either of you really wants to do is sleep, but on different schedules and in a strange and scary place called a hospital.

And how do you get to know someone who is different every single day? Nathan went from sleeping almost twenty-four hours a day – I had to literally shake him awake every couple of hours in order to feed him and clear up the jaundice – to someone who fought sleep and we were lucky to get nine hours a day out of him. From someone who hated to nurse to someone who would cluster feed for hours on end. (No one tells you about cluster feeding, do they? No. They. Don’t.) Someone who hated baths to someone who squalled if you reached for the towel to get him out of the tub. Someone who woke every three hours at night to someone who slept right through. And all of these changes generally took place over the course of a day. Okay, maybe a couple days, but they were fast. Wicked fast. Case in point, Wednesday all of the sudden Nathan refused to go to sleep without a ride in the car. Just stopped sleeping in his crib unless a car ride was involved. Why? What happened that necessitated a car ride?

So you have this new person for whom you are responsible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Their moods and personality change on a dime. And it’s a dime you can’t see for the constant lack of sleep. And sometimes you look at this person who just this week has learned to “communicate” by opening his mouth and screaming at the top of his lungs and you wonder, “What the hell? How did I get here? What is wrong with me that there are still days when I don’t get to take a shower? Other women get to put on make-up. Other families live in clean houses and wear clean clothes. Other women have time for friends – even ones that live outside of their computers. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? WHY IS THIS SO FREAKING HARD?”

It’s like some big secret. Shush! Don’t tell people how hard it is going to be for the first year. Why not? The books don’t tell you. The books taught me how to be pregnant. I can totally do pregnancy. What they didn’t teach me was how to be a parent. Why can’t we take the sparklies off the first year of parenthood and point out that it is freaking hard? That guacamole doesn’t come out of t-shirts. That you have to take the bumpers off the crib every time you change the crib sheets, and oh, by the way, you’ll be doing that a lot and bumpers are bitch what with all those ties.

I have an idea. As mothers why don’t we start being honest instead of competitive? Why not ask a mom how she is doing with breastfeeding and offer her a quick sympathetic story of how you cried and cried and finally literally screamed to have someone take the baby away because he wouldn’t latch and it hurt and you were afraid he was going to die of starvation, so please in the name of all that is holy please take this kid away and give him a bottle! Maybe be compassionate when you see an exhausted mom instead of pointing out how your child sleeps thirteen hours a night and naps three times a day?

Mommying is too hard for us to not be honest. By continually competing with each other we are perpetuating some myth that we can do it all perfectly and do it all without help. And if you can’t do it all perfectly with another set of hands then you fail. Doesn’t matter that your baby is happy, healthy and rested, if you served something frozen that wasn’t organic then you failed your family.

Now having admitted this is the hardest, most stressful thing I have ever done, I will also admit it is the greatest thing I have ever done. I think the Army says it is the hardest job I’ll ever love. Or are they the ones who will do more before 9 am than I’ll do all day? Clearly they haven’t been a parent. Anyway, David asked me today if I had reached that point in Nathan’s childhood where I would say to someone who asked why I was a parent, “You wouldn’t understand.” I replied that I think I am. Maybe it’s not that people wouldn’t understand, but more that I couldn’t articulate exactly what parts make all the crazy hard parts work. Like the outrageous giggles he lets out when David carries him into the bathroom and I’m drawing his bath. The way when I lay down with him for his afternoon nap he nuzzles in close while he is all sleepy and puts his hand on my arm – kind of a “just making sure you’re still there” sort of moment. Watching him do something for the first time. A look of confused wonder comes across face. Then he does it a second time and you can almost see the wheels spinning in his head. The third is a charm because he looks over at me radiant with pride. The way he smells of blueberries. The overwhelming feeling I can’t even begin to describe when he crawls over to me and says “Mom-mom?” and lifts his arms for a cuddle.

So while I still have moments where I miss the flexibility of my old life, and maybe the pedicures, I love my son and I wouldn’t change our relationship for the world. Happy Mother’s Day to the hardest working people on the planet: moms.

Ps. Did I mention it’s hard? Because it is, really.