It’s been exactly three months since I checked into hospital & delivered my little human into the world. Sounds like a short time, but the days (and especially nights!) have been oh so long. Though sleep is rare, there have been many times I’ve found myself lying awake listening to my baby snoring & wondering how I got here. Right now I’m trying to quickly churn this out in the dark sitting next to the baby’s room, before the next feed instead of making dinner for tomorrow - oh the choices, these days!
Motherhood is not something I was interested in for a very long time; it took me a while to come around to the idea of it. I always felt like it was such a long commitment - life long in fact - and to put honestly, I absolutely loved the life I had the way it was. I also passionately despise the pressure women are under to procreate, as if it is the solution to every milestone in our lives. Oh you opened a cafe - but when will you have kids? Congratulations you’re in engaged - when will you have kids? You’re married now - when will you have kids? Yay your cafe is closing down - so when will you have kids? You work from home now - when will you have kids? I’m pretty sure I almost went blind from rolling my eyes for the last half decade. What if I just didn’t know if I even wanted to have a kid, what if I can’t? Is that not okay?
The last straw for me came when at a funeral, I was asked if I was pregnant because I was ‘clearly showing’. ‘Sorry to disappoint, I just gained weight,’ was my response (in hindsight, I shouldn’t have been sorry for gaining Christmas holiday weight). My heart sank & I grew to despise the concept of creating life, it had became a black cloud hanging over me, and my choice not to have a child (yet) seemed to define me more than anything else. I can’t describe how disheartening it was to run into yet another one of my husband’s friends stating ‘you should have a child by now’ on a rare weekend off from delivering cakes. For a long time, the idea of having child was plagued with all this negative energy which led me to place it in the ‘I don’t want to think about it’ basket.
However I came to understand that having a child, or not; is something fiercely personal for ourselves - not to fill a void, not to appease relatives’ expectations of your marriage, not to honour the outdated assumption society has of women, not to cave into peer pressure, and most importantly; it is a commitment you are willing to make for a lifetime. Eventually I felt like I was ready to jump off that cliff & let fate decide if a child would be on the cards for Kenneth and I.
And he is here now - despite a witch and fortune teller telling me I would have a daughter, I’ll be raising a son to appreciate & respect women, and live equally among us. But I’ll let you know how that goes when I get there. Right now, I’m still trying to survive infant life. No one ever tells you how HARD newborn life actually is, the first three months have been brutal - the fourth trimester. After birthing what you think is absolute perfection & being well looked after 24/7 by numerous nurses and doctors for five days, you bundle yourselves into the car & head home. That first drive home feels like the longest drive (though it was literally eight minutes for us); and once you park the car it hits you that you’re bringing a whole new member inside with you. I lasted about twelve hours before I cried, reality dawning on me that in real life there is no button to call the nurse to come in when you don’t know why the baby is screaming their head off - it’s a darn shame they can’t tell us what they want hey? In the first week back home, the baby screaming his head off in the wee hours of the morning, we googled the 24 hour maternal & child health nurse hotline to urgently seek advice (no kidding, I contemplated throwing the baby in the car and heading to the Royal Childrens’ Hospital), only to be told that all he wanted was to fart - but small humans need a little help (that morning I learnt that moving their legs in a bicycle motion helps release gas).
Six long weeks later, in which I’m pretty sure I cried enough water to fill a pond (the hormonal change is real), it was finally time to remove my caesarean wound dressing. The nurse who inspected it asked me if I was a first time mother, to which I confidently replied ‘yes I am, how can you tell?’ Very frankly, she responded ‘you look dead inside, you poor, poor thing. No one tells you how horrible it is, do they?’ And you know what - she was right on. Yet, I don’t think if anyone warned me, I would have fully comprehended the very concept that motherhood could possibly be awful, in the little bubble I was in - I had an easy peasy, simple pimple, almost entirely delightful preganacy. In the thirty-eight weeks I carried my baby, I fantasied about life with him in the outside world. Images of continuing my baking & cooking adventures whilst the baby napped played on a reel in my mind - not knowing that babies need help to fall back to sleep after they wake up every sleep cycle (which can be anything between 20-50 minutes long). My best friend was bewildered when I told him babies don’t actually know how. to. sleep. It’s something we have taken for granted as adults, not realising our own parents trained us many moons ago when we were little humans ourselves.
Very quickly I learnt that, between the waking up every 2-3 hours to feed (then pumping after to increase milk supply, making this a 90 min round trip), cracked nipples, mastitis (who knew you could run a fever & get fluey feels because your boobs are full of milk?), frantically making meals for the next day when the baby is sleeping so you don’t starve (I’ve since learnt to make a huge pot which feeds for days), laundry (or risk wearing your undies inside out), and five second showers; nothing compares to the identity shift and loss that absolutely buries your soul.
I wrote a little passage in my diary a few weeks ago, which described my feelings of an identity crisis which I’ve felt since becoming a mother. What rang loudest to me was feeling this - ‘I mourn the part of me that died when he was born’. I really do & I’ve come to understand it doesn’t make me a bad mom, just human. It has been by far been the most difficult part - accepting that the person I used to be is no longer. In place of her is a brand new person, for when my baby was born, I was born into a new identity. Now as I navigate through this new chapter (with SO much support from fellow women with or without a child, and the men who walk along side us), I remind myself that he won’t always be this little & helpless, and one day rather than shedding tears of feeling chained down by my precious little human, I will be shedding tears the day he no longer needs me. By then, perhaps, it will be me who needs him.