Looking back...

As I enjoy a few moments of quite while my husband takes his turn at what is most assuredly a poopy diaper the likes of which would gross out Beetlejuice himself, I find myself looking back on the past year of pregnancy, childbirth and newborn infanthood, and realizing that there is so much I could have been sharing with all of you! So I am going to do a "Year in Review," a sort of top ten favorite highlights of the last year. I am warning you, some of this may be just as gross as the diaper being removed upstairs.

10. Sickness...morning, noon and night.
I had heard about morning sickness. I saw "Look Who's Talking." Kirstie Alley made puking look kind of cute. Then it happened to me. Usually in the evening, when I had managed to finally choke down something resembling solid food, something that would feel really horrible coming back up, like Frosted Mini-Wheats. It was intensely unnerving...I would retch so hard into my white plastic bucket (which I carried around the house with me because I could rarely make it all the way to the bathroom before spilling the contents of my stomach into the nearest receptacle, however inappropriate it may be) that I would end up with violent red splotches of broken capillaries on my face and neck. It looked like someone had tried to strangle me in my sleep. Actually, my throat felt like someone had tried to strangle me. Or at least had slipped some kind of caustic substance into my lemon water. No one told me that morning sickness would feel like dying, that nausea alone could actually make you weep uncontrollably, or that the smell of cooked chicken or lavender air freshener would induce vomiting. I lost seven pounds the first three months I was pregnant, spent one evening in the ER begging them to make it stop, and didn't eat an entire meal for almost 14 weeks.
9. I'm supposed to drink how much water?!? 
or 
'Peeing every 5 minutes for 8 months equals 156 rolls of Charmin Ultra Soft'
Me without a baby in my belly: Yeah, pregnant women pee. They pee a lot I guess. I mean, there's a thing squishing their bladders or whatever. Makes sense.
Me with a baby using my bladder as his personal trampoline: Wait a minute, midwife who I love and trust...you want me to drink how much water? Because I am already peeing 17 times a day and I am only 9 weeks pregnant. If I spend any more time in the bathroom I am going to start redecorating it. (She smiles knowingly at this point, and repeats that I should be drinking something obscene like 90 ounces of water a day at least.) So I tried to, I really did. And I woke up every 26 minutes every night for the remainder of my pregnancy so I could stumble to the bathroom, hopefully remember to put the lid up first, and pee for the 48th time that day. My lady parts became so sensitive that I turned into a toilet paper snob, spending outrageously for the softest, plushest, most silk-infused tissue on the market. {Note to self...make toilet paper out of cashmere and sell to desperate pregnant women. Million dollar idea!}
8. Hemorrhoids (before and after)
I know that this may be an unpleasant thing to think about, and even more unpleasant to talk about with your newly pregnant friend/patient/family member. But had someone warned me that gaining 55 pounds would give me hemorrhoids the size of cherry tomatoes (or even cherries, for that matter), I would have been much more diligent about NOT eating ice cream for a pre-breakfast appetizer - once I was able to eat solid food again, obviously. I would have MADE time and somehow found the energy to go for my daily walks. I would have thought twice before saying "Hot damn! I am pregnant and married and I can get fat if I want to! Bring on the seconds! Where's the gravy?!" and then following through on that attitude by eating like a hobbit for 5 months. Instead I gorged on an average of 5 meals a day, the last of which often took place at 3 in the morning when my kind husband would make me all manner of tasty treats. I ended up unable to sit on hard chairs...then unable to sit on cushioned chairs...then unable to sit at all. I would go out to restaurants or to church and sit first on one butt cheek and then on the other, rocking back and forth like a Weeble Wobble that was about to, finally, fall down. But, I thought, as month 9 was cruising past me, the end is near! I will push this baby out, lose 20 pounds in the first week, and my booty will again be able to serve its natural purpose of supporting my exhausted body when I plop down on the couch. Wow. I have never been so wrong about anything in my life. (Ok, I was pretty wrong about tight rolling the bottom of my jeans in 5th grade, but I was twelve. What did I know?) No, as soon as the unplanned-for epidural wore off and it was time for me to walk myself, however precariously, to the bathroom, I discovered the ignorant assumption I had been operating under. No sooner did I sit down than I thought, with some distinct alarm, that the whole of my intestines were trying to sneak out of my body as if I wasn't looking and it was time to make a break for it. My previous hemorrhoids, the cute and cuddly ones, had been replaced by evil, supernatural, toxic waste-enhanced hemorrhoids. I attacked them with creams, gels, sprays, suppositories (that was not fun for me OR my husband), and wipes. More than a month after my Monkey was born I was finally able to poop without tearing up. But it was an ugly war, and there was definitely collateral damage. If only I had known.
7. Back labor, front labor...what's the difference?
My mom had back labor. My friend Haylee did, too. Neither of them seemed too bothered by it. I have come to realize that either they really are superwomen, whose pain tolerance is so high that they could have had a limb amputated in a field hospital during the civil war and not even need that big stick between their teeth, or they conspire to keep the gristly details to themselves for fear that no woman will ever reproduce again once she hears about the sheer agony of back labor. Either way, I had no idea what to expect. I read about contractions. It feels tight. It feels like pressure. Your tummy muscles seem to constrict. Well shoot, I feel like that when I get constipated. That doesn't seem so bad. HA! That's what they want you to think, so you feel brave and inspired to say things like, "No, Dr. So and So, I don't want drugs, I want to do this naturally. I want to experience my birth and feel the joyful blah blah blah." That was me BEFORE agonizing back contractions every 90 seconds for 5 hours. I was pretty sure my spine was going to shatter into a million tiny razor sharp shards and pierce through my back in an epic explosion. My doula, my husband, and my sister were taking turns holding me upright, because I was shaking so hard I couldn't hold up my own head. And of course, trying to explain to them that I couldn't do this anymore was pointless. They didn't believe me. They had an absurd amount of faith in me. Thank god for the anesthesiologist, who had no faith in me at all, and who promptly numbed me from the waist down for about 3 hours so I could get that baby out of me without trying to jump out of our third story window. If I would have had any idea that was coming, I would have raised my flimsy hospital gown as soon as the first contraction hit, and let that nice man with the big needle poke my spine.
6. So THIS is what love is.
I loved my mother. I love my husband. I loved the cocker spaniel I had for 12 years. I thought I had a pretty good idea about what love is. I realize now that's like saying that you know how to say "Where's the bathroom?" and "What time is it?" in Spanish, so you must have a pretty good idea how to speak the language. As soon as his slimy purple body with his cone-head and wrinkled feet was plopped on my shuddering stomach, I felt something so intensely profound that I almost couldn't breathe. I knew, in that sweaty, sticky moment, that I would throw myself in front of a bus if it would save him from something painful or sad (and also hoped it wouldn't ever come to that...) I was totally unprepared and it was terrifying. I knew that if anything were to ever take him away from me, I doubted my ability to survive. I would feel like a shell of a person for the rest of my life. I would never recover. It was the most vulnerable moment of my life, recognizing the overwhelming love I had for my son, and making the choice to fully embrace that vulnerability. There was no way I could deny that love, no way I could smoosh it down into something smaller and more manageable. I did not see that love coming...and it changed my life forever.
5. It smells like something died...
The whole umbilical cord thing is a mystery to me. I mean, how that thing managed to keep my baby alive and nourished, not to mention allowing him to remain submerged in fluid without drowning...it's just too crazy for me to understand. What I do understand now, however, is that even though something smells like gangrene, it is not necessarily gangrene. Let me explain. When my husband participated in the ceremonial husband rite of passage and whacked through the umbilical cord, and they told us to wipe his little black stump with alcohol a few times a day, we didn't know how truly gross that prospect would be. When the nurse cheerfully told us it would just "dry up and fall right off in a few weeks" we thought it would be cute. Like a souvenir to keep with his first curl. Then it started to smell. At first we thought the smell was from his poopy diapers. But a clean diaper did not eradicate the stench. When we realized that the ungodly odor was coming from our poor little infant's stumpy cord funk, we freaked. I mean, it smelled like death. Like the decaying carcass of a house cat that crawled into your furnace ducts in winter and never crawled back out. This was one of the first of a handful of ridiculous voicemails I left my midwife. "So Heather? Yeah, um, there's this really horrible smell coming from his belly button, and I am worried maybe it's infected, or something, I mean it smells really bad. Does he need antibiotics or something? Call us back as soon as you can. Thanks." She said it was fine, totally normal, I didn't believe a word she said, and the next day the thing had fallen off and we had to look for it in his jammies. Needless to say, his belly button is not deformed and he did not end up with septicemia. But a little warning would have been nice.
4. 1 Poop, 2 Poop, Yellow Poop, Green Poop
Another ridiculous voicemail to the most patient midwife in the universe. "Hey Heather, it's me again. Um, I have a question. Ha, obviously, since I am calling you. (I giggle nervously and clear my throat.) So his poops, when we got home from the hospital, were mostly yellow, like a dark mustard yellow, kind of like that carpet from the 70s, you know, but more orangey. Anyway now it's green sometimes, like a sort of grassy-olive green, with these kind of white specks, like cottage cheese, but smaller. So is this normal? Because it changes colors, drastically, from one diaper change to the next, and I am just worried maybe he's allergic to my milk, or maybe he's lactose intolerant? I read about that online...anyway sorry to bother you on your cell phone on a Saturday. Call me back whenever you can. Thanks!!" I feel sheepish even just writing this down, much less admitting publicly that I am such a moron. Thankfully Heather called me back and informed me (and this would have been a nice piece of information to have in my head when we left the hospital) that baby poops are usually orange and yellow when they eat breast milk and can be greenish when they eat formula, and since we were giving him a formula bottle at night so mommy could sleep though one feeding and daddy could do something useful, it would explain his technicolor diapers. Now how was I supposed to know that?!
3. Sex? What sex?
Yeah. Apparently it's not an urban myth that couples with kids are too tired or too covered in puke to ever have sex again. How unfortunate.
2. Sleep Deprivation 101
Do you want to get some kind of secret information out of someone you know? Do you want to turn someone into a drooling, spacey, wide-eyed idiot just for fun? Then give them your newborn. Lock them in a medium sized house for about 3 weeks with your newborn, a breast pump, and a giant stack of diapers. I guarantee when you come back they will have their shirt on backwards, they will be reduced to speaking in 1 syllable words and incomprehensible vowels sounds, and they will be eating peanut butter out of the jar with their fingers. You can ask them anything...did you really pass that organic chemistry test or did you cheat off of Randy Thomas?...what happened to the yellow scarf I let you borrow last year?...are you ever going to pay me back that $45 you owe me?...and they will have no choice but to blearily and honestly answer your questions. Just make sure you wipe the drool off their chin in gratitude for their forthcoming-ness. Seriously, I have always coveted my sleep. I never thought I could survive this level of sleep deprivation without hallucinating on a regular basis. And he's not that bad. My sister's son slept for about 30 minutes at a time for the first 6 months of his life. Parents always joke about how you won't get to sleep for the first year of your child's life, and they say it with a smile like it's really not THAT bad, and if you just nap when they nap you'll be fine. The smile they give you when they say this...it's not a smile of humor. It's the smile you wear when your face is too tired to make any other expressions.
1. Sleep Depriv...oh wait...did that one already...(sigh)
I need a nap.