On enjoying your new baby

When BlueEyes was just born, I was overwhelmed to say the least. I read a lot about birth, but almost forgot that the process is supposed to end with the appearance of a baby. I remember when he was just born I heard a baby cry in the room that I was in too, and all I could think was: “please make that annoying sound go away!” It took a fairly long time before I realized that that sound came from my baby. My baby. This little person that I was now responsible for. I was not only supposed to feed and dress this little person, but I was also going to be his mom for the rest of my life. Wow. I hadn’t fully realized that until then. And all of this happened at a time when you’re body is flushed with this ridiculous amount of hormones that changes you from a normally functioning person to someone who will break down in an ocean of tears over nothing.

Add to this the fact that when both your parents and your in-laws live on a different continent they don’t just come to visit for an afternoon, but rather for a week of two, and you might imagine that it took me a while to regain myself. And so when people told me to enjoy the time with my new baby, it sounded a bit like people saying you should enjoy the waves when there’s actually a tsunami. Just making sure BlueEyes was fed and slept and not hijacked by his grandparents was all I could accomplish for a day. Enjoying that really didn’t seem feasible at the time.

Was this postpartum depression? No, I think it’s just normal; I just hadn’t anticipated it. I promised myself never to tell people they should enjoy these first weeks with their new baby, because I had felt how much of a burden it was to not only do all those things, but to also have to enjoy them.

But apparently you forget these things, because today I did just that; I told someone to enjoy her first weeks with the new baby. Apparently I had forgotten about how it really was, and I just thought about a cute little baby and how wonderful it is to hold it and feed it without all of the reality around it. I guess you forget these things and that’s probably a good thing.