What It Takes

There is light and dark and grey in between. This blog is a sharing of my baby journey. My stories reflect upon my early experiences of post natal depression, my struggles with parenthood and my love for my baby.

[babyslumber]

Regression

Feeling a little sheepish over my last post ‘Evolving’. Recently I had the chance to look after my two nephews plus my son for an afternoon. My nephews are aged 7, 4 and my son is 14 months. To put it politely,  it was a s*it show. The eldest couldn’t stop arguing with his brother, all three were constantly wrestling on the ground and I had to umpire their boyish inability to know their own strength. I was exhausted and it was only for a few hours.

I definitely began to question my ability to have even a second. I mean these kids want your soul, your undivided attention. Although it’s meant to be a team effort with your husband we all know for the most part the onus is on the woman to do most if not all of the child rearing. So with that being said, how the hell am I going to do it?

I’m stuck in limbo. I want my son to have a sibling so he can have someone to love when we depart this earth BUT I don’t want to be pregnant, spend a year of my life not sleeping and feel the weight of it all on my marriage. I’m at a stage where my son is 14 months, I’m getting my life back. Everything is getting easier, I could possibly get a job or build a business BUT what’s the point if I’m going to be pregnant in a few months.

I’m going to wait. Time is good. When Dash is out of diapers perhaps I will actually want another baby. Perhaps this is a feeling that grows whereas for now it’s a definite nooooooooooo.

[babyslumber]

Evolving

Before I was pregnant I knew I wanted to have a baby. I was at a stage where I had met my soulmate, we were happily married and I wasn’t getting any younger. I wanted to experience motherhood and evolve past my selfish life to become a better person and I was hopeful that being a mother would accomplish this.

When we fell pregnant I was very happy. Apart from the nausea I was excited. My baby journey had begun and so too had the evolving. It started with my body image. As the weight began to pile on to my little frame I was horrified. My husband would find me staring at photos before I was pregnant, I would shake my head and say, “I thought I was fat here, what was wrong with me? I was hot, you must’ve thought I was crazy when I would whine about my body. I was so skinny and attractive! How did I not see this?”

This actually baffled me, I really must have been delusional to not realize how gorgeous I was before I was pregnant. It made me realize how much I bought into societies vision of beauty. There were days when I would squeeze my non-existent muffin top and consider myself chubby! While I was nearing the end of my pregnancy, feeling the biggest I had ever been, I vowed to never be as harsh about my body or my looks again.

My next ahaa moment came late one night while I watched a documentary on Anthony Robins. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Anthony Robins, he is a world renowned motivational speaker. At the time my son Dash had been killing me with lack of sleep, for some reason all my friends babies were sleeping through the night but not my poppet. Robbins said something along the lines of your journey is not a mistake, people, situations, things are in your life to teach you a life long lesson which is to love unconditionally. It completely threw me because it was so true.  Ding, ding, huge amount of evolving happening here people, I may have moved beyond my selfish needs to enjoying a whole new understanding of love.

On the topic of love, I now see how motherhood has bought about a whole lot of love, love I never knew existed! I now look at the mother in the shopping mall with the unruly kid and I give her a loving nodd. I feel like there’s no distance between her and I, like I could reach out an touch her. I have made so many friends and met so many moms that are just incredible women. I feel a kinship to them all that borders on BFF status, how is this possible?

Now I have moved into the ‘Who am I ?’ phase of life. My husband works and I am at home full time. This has caused so many conflicting emotions, on one hand I want to raise my son and on the other I wonder if I am going to lose myself to motherhood. If I don’t go back to work, will I just whither away? Then these thoughts are forgotten when I read articles like the one I read on Maggie Doyne.

Maggie Doyne was a 19 year old  American girl who decided to work in a Nepal Orphanage for a short period of time before commencing her gap year abroad. She was so affected by what she saw concluding the orphanage was a gateway for child abuse and molestation that she cashed in her $5,000 babysitting money to attain a three story house in Nepal and adopted 51 children. What a woman!!! I was so inspired that I discussed adopting a child with my husband or even taking time out of our Western lives to do something important for the world. He agreed, we discussed working for another ten years and then moving to somewhere like Burma to open an orphanage or volunteer. After our discussion, material things like making money, our house, my clothes etc seemed superfluous. Later that week I found myself having sleepless nights as I thought of all the poor children that were left in orphanages never to be touched or loved.

What is happening to me? I’m evolving at such a rate that I honestly don’t know what to think. I’ve never been altruistic and here I am caring about the silent voices of children to the point where I’m not sleeping? Yet I don’t want to change. Nice cars, nice things seem empty especially when I think about how I now want to live my life. Even though I have no idea where this is coming from, I have this deep desire to give back to mankind.

It’s like I’m evolving past being a mom and caring for one child, which I thought was hard enough, to genuinely wanting to love on droves of children. I’m not even religious! Is this a sign that I’m ready to have another baby?

Or has motherhood simply opened a door for me that leads to my heart?   

[babyslumber]

He's so pretty! That is all.

[babyslumber]

Today I went to yoga for twenty minutes before they came and got me to comfort my son Dash who wasn’t wanting to be in daycare. But in those twenty minutes the instructor read out the above quote and everything negative seemed to drift away. Our challenges are lessons and I, life's humble student, choose to dance!!!

[babyslumber]

Resentment

It’s 4 AM on a Saturday, an hour since the baby has woken for a feed and I’m laying next to Michael, my husband, listening to the monotonous hum of his snore. My insomnia is an excuse for me to carefully study his face. He looks like an angel with his head laying peacefully on the pillow, framed by the blankets he has stolen from my side of the bed.

My mind is racing and I can feel a new type of anger brimming to the surface. It feels like resentment, I thought as I pushed it down to focus on his good points. I married a kind, sweet man, he loves us and he’s doing his best, but my positivity wasn’t cutting it. I was jealous of him, jealous of the freedom he took for granted that just comes hand in hand with being male.  

In the whole six months that I yearned for sleep, Michael was asleep in the room below. He rarely got up to the baby in the night, he rarely re-settled him, even now if Dash wakes the onus is on me to deal with it. I never knew when we decided to have children that the responsibility would be mostly mine. And if I ever raised the subject I felt the warmth of Michael’s mood change and suddenly we were on the brink of war.

“Oh you are such a victim! I do everything for you. You have no idea how hard I work for our family. I do a lot that you don’t notice,” he says defensively. I could cut the tension in the air with a knife.

I know on some logical level that he is right. The pressure of providing for the three of us must be immense and I know he goes above and beyond to make us all happy. So why wasn’t that enough? What did I want? Put simply, I wanted the fairy-tale, for parenthood to be equal. I wanted to see him up at 2AM,3 AM,5 AM putting in the hard yards with our son, for him to unanimously agree that it was harder than going to work, I wanted for him to say thank you to me for all the nights, for all the sh*t, I just wanted him to know what it was like to be a mother.

But in the real world men don’t know what we go through, they have no concept because they are fathers and we are mothers. This is the eternal conversation that every first time mother has with herself and what can you do but accept reality. I didn’t want to resent him, it wasn’t fair of me, he was still the man I loved. Parenthood was piling manure all over our perfectly pristine relationship, that's all!. 

I breathed a sigh of relief in tandem with my husbands snore.

This too shall pass, I thought to myself hopefully and closed my eyes, drifting off to sleep.

.

[babyslumber]

[babyslumber]

Lies, Lies, Lies

When I was nine months pregnant with my son Dash an elderly man, who was sitting next to me in the doctors office, lovingly reminisced on his feelings of parenthood.

“When that baby pops out, the love you will feel for it will be overwhelming. You won’t know what to do with it. You’ll see!”

I smiled joyously, it sounded incredible and I definitely wanted to experience that. At different stages of the pregnancy, I listened to other mothers say similar things along the lines of, “It’s the best thing you will ever do with your life. When that baby comes along you will be smitten.”

I listened to my best-friend (who was also pregnant) fantasize about our two boys playing together, how they would be the best of friends, they would grow up together, independent but always momma’s boys at heart. I remember smiling awkwardly, already aware that she was a “baby, baby” person, something I was not. I never looked at other peoples babies and genuinely gushed over how cute they were. I wondered if that meant I wasn’t going to be a good mother.

I remember every moment of Dash’s birth. I distinctly remember the look he gave me as they laid his naked, bloody body on my skin. He knew I was his mother and in silence his blue sapphire eyes stared into mine with innocent wonder. My waters had broken two days before and I hadn’t slept. I was desperate for the nurse to take him so I could rest. I do remember questioning that all consuming loving feeling I was “supposedly” meant to be feeling, but I was too tired to even think about it.

The weeks rolled by, my precious little boy was the perfect newborn. He ate every two hours, he howled til he was hysterical, he was a force to be reckoned with. I rocked, I danced, I pleaded, I cried. I did everything I could imagine to soothe him, yet it was hit and miss. At no stage had I felt the love hormones kick in and I was freaking out. I had a son who I didn’t have that “immense” love for....WTF???? Actually, it kind of felt like he was a new room mate who liked to throw wild parties, enjoyed loud music and understandably I was hesitantly getting to know him. On the flip side of that I was even more in love with my husband, he was my salvation in those first few weeks and I guiltily felt like it was us against the baby.

Michael’s mother Mary (who was also a “baby, baby” person) was understandably horrified. Michael and I had nick names for Dash that she didn’t approve of, “The squealer,” “The terrorist,” “The GTFTS Baby.”

She would say, “This baby is a blessing you know!” Michael and I would smile and nod, knowing our response was abnormal to most.

One night Michael came home and I was deathly sick with mastitis. He took me to the hospital while his mother looked after the baby. Driving in the car, he began to fantasize, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we just drove to the airport and flew to Mexico. We could call mom from the airport and tell her we’ll be back when he’s two years old!”

I was laughing so hard, my belly ached. Thank god my husband was on my wave length. I couldn’t listen to the “baby, baby” rhetoric anymore because for me it was completely inauthentic. It felt like someone was silencing my true feelings with unrealistic propaganda. Since it was so taboo, I couldn’t publicly voice how motherhood really was for me.

My son recently had his first birthday and after all the friends and family had left his party, I held him in my arms and felt that immense love wash over me. These days Michael and I fight for our sons attention, we relish the moments we have with him. I practically have to twist Michael’s arm in letting the little guy go to bed. 

Looking back, I wish I could tell myself not to worry, that I was normal and everyone’s baby journey is different. It took me around three-four months to feel a loving connection, six months to become an obsessed mother and a year to become more of a “baby, baby” person. Does this make me any less of a good mother? NO, I’m a great mom, I just refuse to lie about it.

A mothers love, like most relationships, is real and rarely does it equate to a Disney fairy tale and that’s OKAY!

[babyslumber]

This morning I danced like a crazy in my living room to this. My baby stared at me with fascination as I overemphasized my old dance moves. I looked outside at the morning sun and couldn’t stop thinking about my dad. Those morning walks we had when I was ten, watching the sun come up and make the ordinary streets look extraordinary. Today is a good day people, I’m feeling very happy.

[babyslumber]

Baby Whisperer

Nobody can prepare you for parenthood. It’s a sad day for the first time mother when she realizes just how out of her depth she really is. After four months of not sleeping, of waking every two hours, I was on the precipice of post-natal depression. I was so tired that I loathed being a mother, I couldn’t soothe him, I couldn’t calm him to sleep, I was lost in the abyss. 

Michael was beyond worried, he had secretly called my mother and asked her to come over to talk some sense into me. I was convinced I needed to go to the emergency department at the Royal Children’s Hospital, I had heard they helped mothers who were extremely sleep deprived. Only in Australia could mothers receive such support.

After trolling the internet I breathed a sigh of relief, I had found a possible solution but it wasn’t going to be cheap.

“Michael, I think we are going to have to get a night nanny or a baby whisperer of some sort. There’s a woman called Jo who has gotten great reviews with getting babies to sleep through the night but...,” I paused wearily staring into his concerned blue eyes, “She’s a lot of money, $1800.”

Without hesitation he said, “Do it. Book her in now.”

I felt my love for him grow two fold.

I waited five days to meet Jo and I couldn’t have waited any longer. My sweet little boy was completely out of control. I had resorted to sleeping with him but that wasn’t working either, I was a mess. When Jo arrived, it felt like gravity had returned, she was the real deal, she immediately put me on a routine and showed me how to pat him to sleep. She took my four month baby who was sleeping a maximum of ten hours within a twenty four hour period and under her schedule he slept for sixteen.

She stayed to help me with the night shift, she told me I could re-settle him with the patting and not to give up if he challenges me with it. She warned that in the beginning it may take an hour of patting him to sleep but in time it’d get faster.

Despite the fact we were going on holiday to Texas the following week, I was still grateful for Jo’s advice. We traveled to the US and it took a month for Dash to settle into any real type of routine but when we did return home his sleep improved significantly. He was seven months old when he slept through the night.

At the time I thought I was behind the eight ball, I realize now how absurd that is. With sleep, I regained my sanity and also the joy of motherhood returned. Post-natal depression, for me, was just another term for being sleep deprived. After all, they used sleep deprivation as a form of torture in war times, it’s a highly effective technique. 

In hindsight I realize there was nothing wrong with my baby. Yes, he was hysterical, he was sleepless, he was 100% acting as a healthy baby should. Problem was I was a first time mother and I didn’t know how to soothe him, lull him back to sleep and that was truly unnerving. How do women do it? Mothers are the unsung heroes, they are everything and then they are nothing and yet my journey has just begun.  

[babyslumber]

This is the first sexy/serious photo I have taken of myself since my son was born. I went out on a moms night, I got dressed up, I put make up on, I drank wine, I laughed with my girlfriends, I felt attractive and stumbled home at midnight!!! It was a rare event but oh did I have fun!

[apregnancycomic]

[babyslumber]

Doctor Lee

It felt like I was suffocating, the panic inside me was overwhelming. I couldn’t believe how debilitating it was, it dominated my thoughts. ‘Breathe in, breathe out, think about Mexico, think about the sea,’ I thought anxiously. 

There was a cacophony of sounds coming from the waiting room, I held my mothers hand as if my life depended on it. She was my rock, the only person who could relieve my pain. She looked at me concerned and tucked my hair behind my ears, “It’s okay, the Doctor will give you something and then you will sleep. You must stop worrying, you need to calm down.” 

I looked into her hazel eyes and feigned a smile hoping this feeling would pass. Dash, my four month old son, played by my ankles. Thank god he was completely unaware of his mothers inability to cope.

“Natalie,” the Doctor called me from the waiting room. We picked up our things and made our way into his office.

“How can I help you today?” He asked in a jovial voice. His face was round and pale, I guessed he was in his late forties but his Asian skin barely showed a wrinkle. 

I didn’t know where to begin, in my paranoid state I doubted he would understand anyway. He clearly had never been a mother, clearly never known the fatigue of doing every night shift for months.

“She’s not doing very well,” my mother said almost reading my mind. Good ole’ mom, she knew all of this was beyond me, I didn’t even have it in me to explain.

“The baby wakes every two to three hours and has done so for four months. Natalie has stopped sleeping as she’s anticipating his next wake up. She hasn’t slept for more than two hours a night for the past two weeks and she’s highly anxious. I think she needs some sleeping pills or a mild form of sedative to help her relax,” she said in her ‘I’m a Doctor, retired Anesthetist actually, but I’ll pretend I’m just a nobody’ voice.

I was so relieved she was there with me.

“Right, so your not coping? Thought about sleep school?” He asked and looked me directly in the eye as if to say, ‘your the patient, I want to hear it from your lips not your mothers.’

“Yes,” I said and the tears started rolling down my cheeks. He looked at me worriedly and then looked at my mother as if to ask, ‘what did I say?’

“I’m sorry,” I said, and like a volcano erupting, I started to bawl uncontrollably  in his office.

“I’m not usually like this,” I said through my tears, struggling to draw breath,  “but I’m at the end of my tether. I’m not sleeping, I’m a complete mess. I think I have post natal depression but I’m so tired, I can’t tell if it’s really that or just exhaustion. I do every night shift and there’s no one to help me and in two days I have to go to Texas to show my in-laws the baby for a month. It feels like I’m drowning and I can’t stop the anxiety.”

“Okay, okay, ” he said softly, nodding to my mother as if she were right after all.

“I’m going to prescribe a light drug called Oxazepam. It shouldn’t affect your breast milk at all. Just make sure you don’t get addicted, only take half a pill. Okay?”

“Thank you.” I said gratefully.

Images of my Auntie Susan flashed before my eyes. Was this how she became addicted to prescription drugs? I suddenly felt a wave of sympathy for the poor woman. Perhaps that’s what children do, they drive their mothers to the brink of no return and the only way to deal with it is to either drink or take prescription drugs.

As I walked out of the Medical Center I smiled at mom, a real smile. She took Dash from my arms and said joyously, “You are going to sleep tonight.”

“You betcha!” I said, returning her enthusiasm and I did. I had to swallow a bunch of pills first but I slept better than a baby.

[life-loving-levi]

“It’s amazing how a tiny human can change you. Not that I was a bad person, I’m just a better one now.”

Roger Mathews (via life-loving-levi)

It's true, my son has fed me humble pie since the day he was born. My eyes are open and there's no going back.

[babyslumber]

This afternoon we took a dip. He snuggled up to me and squealed as I walked him down the river.Motherhood is such a beautiful ride.

[babyslumber]

Down The Rabbit Hole

“Babe, are you okay?”

I was lying on our bed, staring at the monitor. It was midnight and I barely noticed my husband enter the room.

“What?” I asked, staring again at the blank screen certain I had missed something. Had the monitor just flickered or was that my imagination?

“You’ve been staring at that screen for over an hour now. Are you ok?” he asked.

I rolled my eyes. Of course I wasn’t okay. I hadn’t slept properly in four months but he knew that. While he was sleeping peacefully downstairs, I was upstairs trying to survive the night, trying to control my anxiety that was climbing to a whole new level of WTF?

“You know I’m not okay,” I said flatly.

“Why don’t you try sleeping while the baby is sleeping,” he said, looking concerned. I wanted to scream at him, “Wow never heard that one. Full marks for originality,” but I didn’t. On some level I was pissed that parenthood had been so easy for him, compared to the hell I was in, but he’d heard it all before.

“I can’t sleep, he’s waking every two hours so it’s pointless. He’s going to wake up soon.”

Michael stared at me in silence, he was looking at me as if I were an inpatient at a psyche ward but I didn’t care. I was drowning in sleep deprivation, I was in the rabbit hole with no way out. I stared tentatively again at the monitor, please god let him sleep for longer than two hours, I pleaded. Even though I wasn’t sleeping, I still wanted him to and then I could eventually relax enough to contemplate sleep.

“Nat, we need to talk about the flight,” he said worriedly.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I had pushed all thoughts of our holiday to Texas out of my mind. The flight alone was seventeen hours and it scared the be-Jesus out of me. How could I take my four month old son from Australia to Texas? What were we thinking? I’d have to deal with the pressure of keeping Dash quiet through the night at his parents house. The more I thought about it I was certain it was absolute madness. 

“My family are desperate to meet Dash,” he said defensively, almost reading my thoughts.

I nodded my head slowly. Perhaps if I just lay there in silence and pretended to sleep, he would stop talking. I knew he had no idea what he was asking me to do, how could he? He was a male who slept downstairs, his wife dealt with all the crying and re-settling. There was a sea of angst raging inside of me, it was exhausting trying to control it all.

I sat up and put my head between my legs and started breathing deeply. I focused on the speed of my breath, in and out, smooth, it’s all going to be okay. I looked up and he was staring at me again with that same, “my wife’s crazy,” look.

“I’m not coping,” I said frankly, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to go.”

He glared at me as if I were deliberately choosing to be difficult. His reaction was fast, faster than my ability to process it. He sat up, threw his pillow at the wall and screamed “F*ck!”. His frustration was palpable and I didn’t blame him. Two months ago he had paid for our tickets, I knew he was homesick and wanted to see his family, I wasn’t heartless. I watched as he sprung out of bed and paced around the room. 

“I’ll cancel the tickets,” he said. His shoulders were slumped over, he looked like a beaten man.

He crawled back into bed with me and put his arm around me.

“I want you to see the doctor tomorrow. You are not normal,” he said.

I sighed, the weight of his families soon to be disappointment was heavy on my conscience.

“I’ll go first thing,” I said depleted.

I looked at the monitor and he was up.

[realid]

[babyslumber]

My life as a mom.

[babyslumber]

I’ve never been one to worry about my body image but pregnancy changed everything. Suddenly my body was not my own and I’m still struggling to find me. I stare in the mirror at my droopy breasts, my flabby belly and try to get out of my head. It’s ridiculous, I have arms and legs and I’m blessed to be put together and yet I still yearn for the girl I was.