Before and After: Discovering parenthood

Where does the time go?  Somehow, now that days are divided into 3-4 hourly feeds, interspersed with naps, snuggles and various incidents in the diaper region, days fly by and I suddenly realise how very long its been since my last post.  How very long its been since a lot of things, actually.  Long showers, painting fingernails, drinking a cup of tea when it's hot.  Surprisingly to me - someone who loves hot showers, nice nails and loathes cold tea - these differences only occur to me as I sit here now and purposefully reflect on the the before-and-after of my life.

Before, I might have imagined these changes as a problem.  I know that friends and readers without children could find it hard to believe that the ways you change as a parent provide reasons for joy, laughter and general amazement that life could have ever been any other way.

For instance, this morning, I attempted to give Thom a hair cut.  Before, a quick mohawk shave for Thom was part of the weekend routine, situated in between pieces of toast or croissants and strong, Sunday morning coffees.  Today, we had to employ precision timing to get this simple, everyday task done-and-dusted between Wriggly Man's feeds and naps.  After 10 minutes of silence through the baby monitor, we thought it a safe window to get the clippers out.  But Wriggly, who must be a little psychic, woke up screaming just as Thom's head was half shaved.  We hurried through (and I'm afraid this week's mohawk might be a little crooked) so I could quickly get to Ethan and comfort him.  Covered in hair clippings is no way to snuggle a baby, so I stripped down and legged it up to little man in the old birthday suit.  Ah, the big adventures that come with such a little person.

Here's a few other odd things I've noticed in parenthood:
1. Fascination with Faeces
      Baby poo is gross.  Unless it's your baby's poo, and then it's an event.  We look to it like tea leaves, saying to each other, So that's why he's been so fussy, look at that poo! It's a suitable conversation topic at any time of the day.  It's colour, consistency, timing, smell are all very, VERY interesting.  It's difficult to say what changes as a parent.  The poo still stinks.  It's still poo, and we still recoil and wash it off clothes and hands with appropriate disgust.  But it also like a little window into baby's world.  A small way we begin to understand and identify with him.  By analysing his poo, we can say to him and each other, Yes, I would also feel happy/upset/content after a poo like that.

2. Sleep is optional
      Everyone asks, Are you sleeping?  I would say, yes, except that what counts as sleep now is totally different than before.  A few stolen moments of closed eyes, when you fall instantly into a dream about doing the thing you are about to do in a minute when you wake - that counts as sleep.  So when I get an hour between 2 and 3 am, I feel practically refreshed.  Thom said to me last night that he noticed a new forehead wrinkle on his face.  I'm hardly surprised.  We look really old as we get up in the morning.  Pre-coffee, bed-head, under-eye-baggage zombie-looking people.  It would be easy for us at this point to snap and snarl at each other's ugly faces.  But once Ethan is fed and playing on his sheepskin in the morning light, we are again restored and ready to face the day on mere minutes of sleep.

3. Enjoying giving up things you enjoy
     Before you have a baby, people say to you that you'll never have a hot meal/night out/a cent to your name again.  All of this is true.  And so many more minor things go out the window as baby enters the front door.  What these negative-ninnies don't mention is that you won't mind.  Baby's happiness and calm means more than all these worldly treasures and you'll find that you'll willingly sacrifice most things in exchange for a peaceful little person.  Just the other day I found myself pillaging AAA batteries from all available devices to get Ethan's Slumber Buddy working again.  This frog-shaped nightlight, complete with lullabies and heart-beat sounds is intended to send baby off to dreamland.  And for that I thought we could survive without a TV remote, wireless mouse or any other gizmo that previously would have been sorely missed.

4. You go a little bit insane, but it's all good
      For one thing, we have become obsessive.  I wonder what Thom and I ever talked about before Wriggly Man.  Whether we are debating the meaning of a particular tone of cry, laughing a his funny little ways or day-dreaming about his future all we seem to talk about is Ethan.  Even when we aren't talking about him, the subject matter is tangentially related to him.  What's for dinner?  Well, what can be cooked in time before he wakes up for a feed?
     We have lost our minds in other ways, too.  The things that seem normal, or even desirable now would be inconceivable to a person in their right mind.  Basic baby-tending behaviour sounds insane sometimes and even more so for the fact that these crazy things we do for baby feel ok.  If baby's nose is stuffed up, sucking the snot out of it seems like the best thing to do.  Sucking the snot out of somebody else's nose is normal.  Who'd have imagined? If baby is gnawing and pulling at my breast, I wonder if he doesn't like the taste today.  Sounds crazy.   There is no doubt that we have lost our minds, but it feels alright.

5. Baby crying is less annoying than you might imagine
      It's not annoying at all.  It is, however, heart-breaking.  Before baby, when you hear a baby cry in on an airplane or in the supermarket it is a difficult sound to tolerate.  But since Ethan, the crying is nothing like those times.  If we can divine what the crying might  be about - hungry, sleepy, cold - it isn't so bad because we can do something.  We spring into action with the calm assurance that crying will soon be comforted with whatever it is he needs.  But Ethan has no other way of communicating with us and sometimes we don't get it.  The sound of him crying is utterly tragic to us when we can't fix it.  Minutes feel like hours when he cries, but not because of annoyance.  It's because we want to cry with him.  I take it as all part of us gelling as a little emerging family.  When one cries, we are all sad.  But also when one is happy, we all smile.

         

Bonding and breastfeeding? Bollocks.

Once you have transversed the politics of pregnancy, you might imagine that the world can finally mind its own business and leave you to your body in peace.  Or at least that was my naive expectation.  But as soon as your little bundle enters the world the question will be how you plan to feed him/her.  Yes, this will be on the final exam and here’s a hint: bottle is the wrong answer.  And the word ‘formula’ is an instant fail. 

Breast is best.  Breastfeeding is free and saves you the trouble of preparing bottles.  It’s good for baby in so many ways, both for nutrition and immunity now and to set him up for future good health.  Photos around the maternity wards instill a feeling of warmth around the whole enterprise, showing glowing mums smiling at peaceful, content infants.  And if that hasn’t sold it to you yet, they say it’ll burn that preggo fat. 

Well, I was all ready to sign on the dotted line.  When tragedy struck and the boys weren’t able to start breastfeeding straight away, I decided not give up.  I would pump and be ready for when they were ready.  The hours of driving between Colchester and Norwich were passed with Thom and I listening to the thumping, electric drone of a portable breast pump.  Had giving birth in a room filled with 20 or 30 strangers not already robbed me of any self-consciousness, motoring past white vans and lorries with a boob being sucked into a machine certainly would have. 

Formula was an essential for our boys and for all babies on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  And even after Ethan came home, between my stress levels and Ethan’s low weight, we needed formula, at least as a top up for my lagging milk production.  Despite the rocky road that led to the necessity of formula for us, we found that no health professional who tripped across our path would offer any advice to help us use formula.  The stock line was that breastfeeding was THE way.  Formula was shunned like the very excretion of Satan’s mother herself.  Even my Tesco Clubcard points and Boots Advantage Card points were refused against the purchase of formula.  Government policy, I was told, to encourage breastfeeding.  It was like I wasn’t buying baby SMA, but baby SMAck.  Maybe not illegal, but certainly frowned upon.  

Here’s something I didn’t realise before but is an astounding part of breastfeeding:  It is totally dependant on a calm state of mind.  I would class myself as a big believer in the link between body and mind, but I expected that being calm would merely help.  How wrong I was.  I discovered that being stressed is like turning the milk tap off.  I was advised to try and look at photos of the boys when pumping to get the milk flowing.  But seeing their little bodies all wired up to medical gear made me cry and seeing no milk at the end of pumping session made it worse.  As the days went on and Noah’s condition deteriorated, I found that thinking of Ethan allowed some milk production, but the moment my mind drifted to how Noah was doing, it stopped.  I discovered that there was only one thing for it – distraction.  So I’d set myself up with a few magazines, an array of snacks and the TV remote before settling in to battle with the boobs. 

the difficult days of hospitals and pumping

All those endless hours of pumping didn’t inspire belief that I could actually make milk.  I was told that pumping every few hours, even through the night, would soon establish a supply.  But even with distraction techniques, I was disheartened by the few measly drops that trickled into the bottles even after hours of pumping. 

But my experience is thankfully different from most new mothers, who might find that breastfeeding is easily established.  When we got Ethan home, the milk soon arrived in response to feeding him on demand.  And yet, the idyllic picture of mother and child, enveloped in mutual love and joy while breastfeeding continues to allude me. 

Ethan is a cute little boob-monster, don’t get me wrong.  We have lots of fun and cuddly times together in and around feedings.  But these are interspersed with lots of other times filled with worry, frustration and exhaustion. 

post-feed chill out face

The worry is mine.  Is he getting enough?  Have I eaten something that’s making him fussy?  Is he crying and pulling away because I’m doing something wrong?  The frustration is often his.  Maybe when he’s not getting enough.  Maybe when he’s getting too much.  Maybe when he wishes he could just suck without the bother of milk invading his mouth.  

He growls and flails his little fists at me, latched on harder than a barnacle on a bow, but pulling away in baby-rage, taking my nipple with him.   I sit in shock (and pain) at his behaviour.  Usually around 4am, I begin to think, ‘I’ve allowed you unrestricted access to my breasts, all day and all night, and you are the frustrated one?’  But that’s the tough world of being a baby, I guess.  It’s either absolute heaven, when you’re getting all you want right on time, or absolute torture, when mom just can’t fathom what the hell you’re asking for.  The tough world of being mom is about developing a tough skin, both metaphorically as well as physically.  

Even though my introduction to breastfeeding has been unusual and tougher than some, but I’ve also discovered that I might not be alone in my ambivalence about breastfeeding.  Which is handy because I was starting to feel like a bad mum.  The Internet has helped me feel like less of a monster for surviving feeds by playing tetris and online shopping (I can't even begin fathom how women ever survived the hours of breastfeeding before television).  Through the internet, I found other women who love their babies but loathe the breastfeeding.  Click here to read another tough mamma's blog about the battle of the boobies 

The idea that I might bond with anyone, baby or not, by letting him try to remove my nipple over the course of six months with hoover-like suction power is ludicrous.  If, like me, you are struggling on with it, good for you.