{Originally published at Mommy Needs Therapy}

Reading over my last Tales of the Breast post, I realized it was a bit clinical, and with all the talk about Mother’s milk tea, and herbs, and domperidone, etc. I forgot what my original intent was: To write about how much I love breastfeeding Kiel. How special it is.

I love when Kiel first latches on and gets that first mouthful of milk, how his eyes roll back in his head as if he’s experiencing nirvana.

I love how his hand is always moving, running over my body. Sometimes grabbing my nose, or finding its way into my mouth for me to kiss and nibble on. If both breasts are exposed he’ll head right for the other nipple and grab it, twisting and tweaking. I swear his Daddy didn’t teach him that. Such a little man already.

Sometimes, it isn’t enough for him to just move his hands over me, he has to move his legs too. Kicking at the breast he isn’t nursing from, as if he’s tenderizing it for his next course.

I love how he looks into my eyes, with his sparkly blue-gray eyes and sometimes stops and smiles, the corners of his mouth moving up and out. A little bit of milk spilling out.

{Originally published on It’s My Life.}

“I am so tired.” She said, “why don’t they tell you about this?”

“Bu-uh-ut,” I stammered. “I did tell you.”

And I had, over and over again, for at least the last four months of her her pregnancy.

“Oh, I know,” she answered. “I just didn’t realize that no sleep, meant really no sleep.”

I thought back to all the times I’d tried to warn her and I knew I was partially to blame. It’s true. We don’t tell our pregnant friends everything, not because we don’t think they can take it, not because we don’t think they’ll believe us, but because it hurts to relive it and it’s easier to joke about sleepless nights than to go into details about how hard it really is.

So, my dears, here it is, the dirty dirty truth. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

No one tells you that you will stand in the shower day after day and sob because you can’t stand the thought of getting out and facing your baby again. No one tells you that some days you stand in that shower and it takes all your willpower not to curl up into a ball on the ground under the pelting shower stream. You don’t let yourself because you know that you’d never get up again.

No one tells you that with every lost hour of sleep you go slowly a bit more crazy and that the middle of the night is the darkest, scariest, and loneliest time. That you will dread the dusk because it’s the signal that night is coming and you just don’t know if you can survive another night.

No one tells you that you will grow to hate being touched and that some days it will again take all your willpower not to scream when someone places a hand on you, even as a gesture of love and support. By the same token, no one tells you that you will grow to hate sex or even the promise of sex and resent the person requiring it from you. Sex becomes just another chore at the end of a long and tedious day of tending to people’s needs. A chore that requires a lot of touching.

No one tells you that spending all day with a baby is boring. Mindnumbingly boring.

No one tells you that you will feel like half your brain has up and left you. You will forget everything. You will lose the ability to multi-task. You will lose the ability to form a coherent sentence.

No one tells you that you will resent, and even sometimes hate your kids, for many, many things like destroying your body and stealing your brain.

Originally published on The Calm Before the Stork.

So, lesson number one postpartum: Don’t set your blog readers up for a two or three part series when you barely know if you’ll be sleeping any day soon.

When I sat down to write that first post-birth post, in a fit of adrenaline (post-mama’s-first-meconium, ahem), I had the story all mapped out in my head. But once I’d finished the birth part, I needed a nap.

I still need a nap.

But I must finish the story.

Suffice it to say, or rather, in summary, in short: My baby was starving.

They tell you that the baby comes into this world with about three days’ worth of fat stores. Enough to keep him going while he and you learn how to breastfeed him on the meager yet thick drips of colostrum, until your milk comes in.

I was able to get something that looked like latching going on that first night in the hospital. The night nurse, a young black woman with a thick island accent, oversaw these attempts. The baby was crying. A lot.

“Oh, he is hungry! And he is frustrated! Oh yes, he is very very frustrated,” she said, over, and over, and over, and over, about 17 times, in a singsongy voice.

I didn’t sleep that first night.

Originally posted on Okay, Fine, Dammit

The minute Emma was born, I knew something was wrong. I’d swallowed a horse, fought its hellish bucking to the death, turned myself inside out, until I won. Until she slid breathlessly — literally — into the world. I listened for her bourning cry but it did not come, because she was not breathing.

I lie there, split apart at the seams and bleeding out, and watched
the scene as if from above. I bore witness while the midwives pumped
oxygen into someone else’s baby for eleven minutes before they called
9-1-1, before two ambulances delivered both of us to a nearby hospital.
It was all for naught anyway — by the time we got there, she was
breathing on her own as if nothing had ever happened.

When we left the hospital for home, Emma was perfect in every way
but one: she would not nurse. She could not suck. I knew the
powers-that-be wanted to remedy the situation with a feeding tube, to
rapidly ameliorate the problem and neatly close out our file, but she
was our second child and so I had faith in my body, and in my baby.
Somehow I held patience as she lost weight.

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