It Takes You By Surprise
I remember!
The best thing about my new babies, identical twin girls, was them! After years of wanting children and not getting pregnant, they were finally here! I loved them immediately and completely.
The worst thing about my new babies was that they were babies. I had never been around newborns much. When I had been around a newborn in the past, it had always come with a caregiver of some sort – a mom, a dad, or a grandparent always was hovering nearby to take the baby as soon as I showed that I was through with it. Now, I had two brand new babies. My mother was coming to help for two weeks and my mother-in-law was coming for one week, and then I would be on my own all day until my husband could be home late in the evening. And I was completely unprepared for this new, overwhelming responsibility. I had graduated from college with honors, held two good jobs since (plus a job at night to help with expenses during those first years of marriage while my husband was in graduate school), become a graduate student myself, with my sights set on a PhD, and led a productive adult life so far. And it was a surprise to me to find that two babies could bring me to my knees in fear!
These two little girls wanted to nurse every two hours and pooped or peed in their tiny diapers at an alarming rate, getting diaper rash that made me hurt to look at it. They cried every night from about 7:00 until 11:00, and no matter what I did, they were not consoled. They nursed so much that I developed a breast infection, and it hurt so much to nurse on that side that my feet would sweat. They were not on any schedule that I could count on from one day to the next, so I couldn’t even get a shower or eat a regular meal. They were totally cute, and when they were asleep I would sneak into the nursery and stare at them with love, but when they were awake they were more than I could handle.
Here is the thing:
New motherhood is a hard adjustment. I had come from a life as an adult where I had at a good bit of autonomy. My husband and I had been married for five years and we had been able to live pretty much as we pleased. Sure, there had been very little money in those first two years while my husband was in graduate school and I was teaching and working a second job at night, but I could make dinner when we wanted to eat, and sleep or shower without worrying about small people who needed me.
If you are a mother, you already know what I am talking about. Moms have to give up a lot. But there are rewards that outweigh the crazy. So this blog is about the joys and the stresses that Mothers everywhere face. I am now a mother of seven grown children and our seventeenth grandchild is on the way. Obviously motherhood has been a focus of most of my adult life. I want to start a place where people can share what they have experienced as parents – the wonderful, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Maybe my some of my seven children and their spouses will share with you some of their thoughts. And I am hoping you will want to share some stories of how children have impacted your life.
Let’s start this!