The Day I Gave Birth Wasn't The Best Day Of My Life

Maybe you and I have different ideas of what qualifies as a “good” day. For you, perhaps a good day includes unbearable pain, bloodletting, strangers in surgical gloves poking and prodding you, and visits from your relatives while your boobs hang out as you attempt breastfeeding for the very first time. For me, well, I’m a simple gal. If someone tells me my hair looks nice, it has been a good day.But please, nothing involving blood. This is why I don’t understand why so many women carry on this notion of the day that they gave birth as having been one of the best of their lives.

The day I gave birth to my son was definitely not the best day of my life. Not even close. It happened on a Monday morning, when my wonderful and gifted OBGYN expertly pulled my son out of me via cesarean section. My baby was placed on my chest for a quick family photo, before being wheeled away along with my proud but dazed husband. My doctor then proceeded to put my guts back into my body and sew me back into a whole human again. I still swear to this day that I could feel everything she was doing, down to the burning sensation of when she was cauterizing my insides. My body shook for a full hour after the surgery, from all the adrenaline and the drugs running through my system. I passed out and was wheeled to a recovery area where after an hour or so I woke up groggy and confused to see my father in law standing uncertainly at the foot of my bed. Does this sound like the best day ever yet to you? Me neither.

By late morning, I had hosted about 20 members of my extended family in the small partitioned area of the hospital room that I shared with another mom who had just given birth to her second baby and who was already packing to go home (I’m sure she appreciated all the extra company).My mom visited and, as usual, complained of the traffic. She was hungry and wondered what kind of snacks I might have on hand for her to nibble on, as if we were home and in my own kitchen and she had been expecting me to have prepared a nice spread. I had to explain multiple times, to multiple family members, the importance of hand washing before holding my newborn child who, just hours before, had been protected in my womb by mucus membranes. And no, a squirt of Purell did not count.

Bringing a new baby into the family is as much about other people’s egos as it is about a major life change of your own. Did you know that? I didn’t. You will find that some family members will ponder, often aloud, “How does your new baby affect ME?” In the hospital room, I found some family members openly wondering not only, “How does this baby resemble me?” but also, “What does the baby’s name have to do with me?”

and even better, “How can I somehow impart some wisdom onto you and also tell you a funny baby story about me?”It is all very exhausting when you’ve just gone through major surgery and haven’t slept since your water broke, 24 hours before.

My family, though generally decent when it comes to reading social cues, looked puzzled when the nurses came to check on “the surgery site.” This sounded very proper and hygienic when a medical professional was saying it to a roomful of cousins and grandparents, but the nurse was essentially trying to say: “We need to look at this here lady’s vagina and also at the gaping wound above it. So could y’all step out a sec please, thanks?”

And when it came time to breastfeed, I had to endure the very uncomfortable looks on my mother’s face – as if I had just jumped onto my hospital bed to perform a sexy burlesque routine instead of struggling to feed my hungry newborn.

By the afternoon, a Facebook photo that my aunt had posted of me sitting topless in the hospital bed while awkwardly trying to nurse the baby for the first time had nearly gone viral. After my sister alerted me, my husband had to catch my aunt before she left for San Francisco to ask her to kindly take the photo (which I know she only posted with love and pride) down from the Interwebs.

So all this time, a new mother is supposed to rest and get some sleep, but that is fucking impossible with visitors coming round the clock to see the baby; plus all the nurses checking on the wounds and the catheter; plus my topless photo situation (FML!). Then, I attended a breastfeeding class, where I sat in a cold hospital chair in some kind of meeting room with other weary postpartum women.

I was wearing my husband’s oversize sweatshirt over my hospital gown, bleeding buckets of post-surgery slash post-labor blood into what was basically an adult diaper.This day was still not going down as one of my best.

After the last visitor said goodbye, my husband spent some time with the baby and me before going home. This was the deal we made: he would go home and recharge so that he had the energy to help me and the baby during the days at the hospital (and with a c-section, there were many). So after he left, it was just me and this little new guy.

This part of the day – or evening rather – was actually good. Great, even. I stared at my baby’s face, amazed that he was here, that I had something to do with shaping him. The day of his actual birth had been so busy, I hadn’t had a moment to process his arrival, to even look at his face, or to take it in.

“Oh, hey you,” I whispered to him. “When did you get here?” I nursed him in the quiet hospital room, alone for the first time, and closed my eyes, focusing on the feeling of this little life in my arms tugging on my breast and on the little whimper sounds he was making. It was all so new and wonderful, and I had almost let it all pass me by without a moment of being present. I felt like a bride who had been so swept up in all the things that had been going wrong or right on her wedding day that she had forgotten to look at her husband and listen to the music and just feel the good and the love of being there together.

That little newborn boy just turned five years old, and we have had so many awesome days since that first day together.And though the day he was born was special and one I will never forget, there have been far better ones, full of wonderful memories where I was much more present (and much more clothed!)and more engaged.A lot of our best days happen in the quieter moments and on much smaller scales than one might expect: sitting on the curb eating a snack from a vending machine talking about a weird dream he had the night before, watching him enjoy the thrill of jumping over the waves at the beach for the first time this past summer, or seeing him smile with satisfaction at the end of a particularly good bedtime story that I’ve just told him on the fly.Best days don’t always have to be epic ones.

And, call me weird, but my best days most often do not include trips to the hospital or peeing through a catheter. Maybe yours do. And if that’s the case, that’s cool. I won’t judge. You do you.

Originally published here.

What Do You Do All Day?

We've all been on the receiving end of the question. #MINDRMAMA Alexis Barad-Cutler reports. 

When you’re not in the trenches of early motherhood, it can be hard to grasp the kind of mental and emotional work that it entails. From the outside, it seems like a cushy job that lets you work from home, nap during the day, and maybe even watch some daytime TV. But as any new mom eating over a sink and calling that lunch can tell you, early motherhood has little to do with rest and relaxation. It’s hard work, full of sour milk, boob sweat, and lots of tears. And yet, any new mom constantly gets asked the question, “So what is it that you actually do all day?”

The first time I remember being asked the “what do you do all day” question was during a trip to visit family in Florida with our first-born. We were walking through town, trying to get our then-infant son to nap, when my mother-in-law spotted some family friends in one of the outdoor cafes. We went over to say hi, and all I could think was, “Can we just keep walking?” (As every mom knows, babies not in motion don’t stay asleep.) Suddenly everyone was staring at me, and that’s when I realized the husband was asking me a question:

“So what is it you do all day now that you’re a mom?” he asked, an amused look on his face, like he expected me to melt in a pile of maternal bliss just thinking about how great my days were. “Do you guys, just, you know . . . hang out?”

I stood there, speechless, and my brain started to overload with the millions of things that my baby and I did during the day that did not by any stretch of the imagination feel like “hanging out.”

I wanted to scream about the four times a night I was still waking up to soothe my baby back to sleep, which made my attempts at napping during the day a necessity and not a luxury. But then I would also have to mention that the terror of waking to the sounds of a cat being skinned from chin to tail – i.e. my child’s shrieks anytime he was put down in his crib – didn’t really make the naps seem worth it. I wanted to tell him about the hours per week I spent hooked to a wheezing, huffing breast pump. And how pumping while taking care of a baby is like trying to chew gum and walk, except instead of chewing gum, you’re trying to hold a baby out in front of you so that you don’t knock your pump shields off your nipples and you’re walking to the changing table to deal with a poop situation.

And that wouldn’t even have touched the daily logistics of caring for a baby; like the fact that the minute you get them changed into a clean outfit, they’ve already managed to pee up the back of it and you need to start all over again. Or what about the Amazon orders, or signing up for baby music classes and movement classes, scheduling doctor’s appointments (there are so many in those first few months), doing laundry, washing bottles, cleaning breast pump parts, and making sure to never, ever run out of diapers. It is monotonous. Relentless at times.

It’s not easy to be with a child all day. The ones who are too young to move or talk have very big needs – the feeding, the diapering, the swaddling. By the time a baby is mobile, you can’t even think about sitting down or looking away. Every moment feels like you’re playing defense against “Team Death.” And when your child is older, it sometimes seems like they never stop talking – to the point that there’s no room for a single thought of your own. It can make spending a day with a kid feel like you’ve been trapped inside a free-association method acting exercise – except that’s just how elementary school aged kids talk.

So, hanging on by a thread? Yes. Hanging out? Absolutely not. The good thing is, as time goes by, and you earn more of your parenting stripes, the logistics get a little easier to manage, but of course, they get even bigger. I have two boys now, and I work part time, but a huge chunk of my day is spent managing my children’s schedules. It’s like I’m a personal assistant to two very important, high-up execs. For example, sometimes it takes ten texts to various nannies or several rounds of emails before I land a play date for one of my kids because Yes I Live In New York City and we are crazy here.

I’m not alone, or special. Women – moms – are mostly the ones who carry the mental load when it comes to the care of their children. Even when they are at work, the mother is the one doing all the stuff behind the scenes – advocating on behalf of their child with a learning disability, or seeking out support for a child with an emotional problem, or a medical issue – society has decided this is women’s work. Personally, I think women would take it on either way. 

There was something else that troubled me about this stranger’s question, more than the fact that he asked me and put me on the spot to explain my day (I could easily have asked how he spends his retirement, but I didn’t). His question felt like an accusation. “You must have it good. What could you possibly have to complain about, Miss I Get To Stay At Home With My Baby?” When I was finally able to respond, I was grasping at anything I could think of that others would deem “important work” and muttered something about random freelance projects I was doing in my spare time.

But why did I do that? It was because I knew – from his question, his tone, and from the look on his face – that he didn’t think my life as a mom was difficult, or important. Unfortunately, he’s not an outlier in his perception of motherhood. Women must continue to share their stories of motherhood, and to speak about their important work. I wish I didn’t give that family friend the satisfaction of any stumbled or insecure answer, all those years ago. Mothers shouldn’t have to defend or explain their days to anyone.

Photo credit: Stylish & Hip Kids.

Originally published here.