After nine long months, we now have a new little roommate.  She’s very cute and cuddly, but I have to say that- from the get-go- this whole mom thing is not exactly what I expected.
I mean, of course, the best laid plans go awry, and frankly, we should detailed our plan B way more carefully. Neither my husband or I had ever been in the hospital before, and we were completely unfamiliar with area hospitals. When all of a sudden I was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia and had rush to the hospital, we had no idea what we were in for. While I am grateful for everything the hospital did, the process of becoming a mother for me was no where near the empowering, mother-goddess experience that I had somehow come to expect. 

The stay before and after labor was degrading at best. The labor was traumatic: NOTHING like what I was taught to expect from what I had read or heard about.  There was no rush of overwhelming motherly love; our baby did not have a halo or seem dreamlike in her debut. Other than sheer exhaustion and relief at the labor being over, I was mostly struck at how similar she looked to a very tiny, wet, old man who had just lost a boxing match.

I kept think about that scene in Alien where an alien explodes through that guy’s chest. Lucky bastard. Granted, that guy didn’t have anesthesia, but after the thing emerged from him, it ran away. No one slapped a bow on it and asked him to breastfeed. 

I could not have possibly imagined all the blood, the pain after the birth. Did you know giving birth literally takes days? As in multiple twenty four hour periods. I did not sign up for literal days of labor, and yet, that’s what I got.

And the crying- and oh God there is SOOO much crying. My family and the media all make the crying and the sleepless nights sound cute and funny. Guess what: Not funny or cute. at. all.
Well… the baby is super cute, but you know what else is cute? Kittens on the internet, and internet kittens let me sleep more than 45 minutes consecutively. Caring for a newborn is essentially miserable. I don’t feel like I can write about it though because there is so much pressure to only express bliss and joy at the arrival of your newborn. I feel like expressing any kind of ambivalence or frustration makes me a pariah. Surely someone else there is going through a similar thing.