what i never knew i never knew about having a baby...

i recently had a discussion with my dear friend amg about the past year-and-a-half of my life — from getting pregnant to being pregnant to giving birth and now being a mom — and we decided that as someone completely baby-illiterate, it could be potentially beneficial to others like me if i shared my thoughts about this unimaginable new experience.

i think what has shocked me the most is that i consider myself a fairly well-educated, well-prepared person, and over the last 18 months, i have never felt more clueless and helpless in all my life. no amount of reading or "learning" could have ever prepared me for this. i can only imagine that if i had been around a baby for more than a minute or two while growing up, then i wouldn't have felt such anxiety, failure, pressure, fear and lonliness, but i can never really know that for sure.

oh shit, there are two lines on the stick
finding out i was pregnant was both exciting and terrifying — mostly terrifying. i remember comparing it to being strapped into the front car of a roller coaster and realizing that there's no longer any chance to run through the chicken exit. i mean, theoretically i could have unbuckled the safety belt and jumped out of the moving car, but what would that really have got me besides a lot of bruising and potential permanent damage. so as i slowly clicked my way up the hill, glancing back at the safe, stable platform i had just left, i faced the open sky above me as i wondered what the drop would be like on the other side. would it be completely terrifying, fun, easy, hard... would i survive? i wanted answers so badly, but i had to wait until i got to the bottom of the hill before i could know anything, and my patience was so thin — this was my life, i needed to know what lay ahead.

there's a human being growing inside me?
being pregnant was a very lonely experience for me, and i even had the benefit of one of my best friends being knocked-up at the same time. i had so many racing thoughts, questions, fears and feelings that i felt nobody could understand, and i just had to keep living with them inside me. i continued to see my psychologist, but even that could only help so much. i have struggled with depression in the past, and the cocktail of crazy prego hormones plus chemical imbalances plus my general fear of the unknown provided a perfect recipe for a depression daiquiri. to top it off, i didn't really have the option of taking anti-depressants while pregnant. in fact, i realized that one can't do a whole lot of anything while pregnant, and i think that was a huge contribution to the loneliness.

my biggest fears during pregnancy were basically:
• hating motherhood and regretting having a baby
• not loving my baby
• making my baby feel unloved or unwanted
• ruining my baby's life

i remember actually having the thought, "what should i do when my baby gets here and i realize that motherhood is not for me?" i went through various scenarios of leaving the baby with his dad and moving far away to start a completely new life. i figured that if i was having such serious feelings of doubt at the time, why would they go away once the baby got here?

although my husband would understandably disagree, i think i did a fairly decent job of keeping myself in check. i really only let out about 40% of what was actually in my head. scary, i know. i hit the peak of my anxiety the day of our first childbirth class when i went through a complete outer-body experience. i felt like the real me was watching the prego me go through the class thinking, "that's not me. i don't get pregnant. i don't have babies. and yet i'm due in a few weeks." i couldn't get my head around it at all, and everything started to visibly look unfamiliar. my husband of 4 years seemed like a complete stranger while he held me and helped me practice breathing. i didn't recognize anything. it was like i had amnesia.

after the class we went out for lunch and i had to ask my husband if he was still interested in having three kids. i couldn't imagine going through any of this again — heck, i still wasn't sure i could handle the rest of my current pregnancy. when he said that he was fine if we only had one, i remember letting out an enormous sigh of relief. at the time, it was the best thing i could have heard. the fog began to lift and i felt like i could breathe a little easier.

maybe these consecutive contractions don't mean i'm going into labor
for the last few months of pregnancy i slept downstairs on the couch because i could no longer get comfortable lying down. sleeping by myself didn't really bother me at this point, and i tried to make the most of it because we didn't have a tv in our bedroom so i would stay up and watch some shows. the night i went into labor, i was getting ready to go to sleep and i felt an overwhelming sense of fear, loneliness and anxiety. i didn't want to be alone and i couldn't figure out why. i started having typical braxton hicks contractions and thought nothing of it until they kept coming. i tried to go upstairs and sleep with my husband, but that didn't help. i tried walking around and that didn't help. finally i realized i was probably going into labor, so i called the doctor. she told me to keep track and if i have contractions for an hour less than 5 mins apart, i should go to the hospital. an hour later, that's exactly where we headed.

the following 15 hours were not fun. there was nothing fun about childbirth. it was painful, unknown, scary, and again, lonely. the epidural helped, but was terrifying to get in the first place, and it's not enough to keep the pain of those final contractions away. what really didn't help was that i wasn't sure i would even like the end result of all this anguish i had been experiencing over the last 9 months.

i remember the nurse being so excited for me to start pushing, but i didn't share her enthusiasm. for one thing i didn't know how much it would hurt, but also i knew it was the final stretch of the pregnancy journey. at the end there would be this baby that i hopefully liked and would have to start learning about. i wanted the end of pregnancy to symbolize a return to normalcy, not a beginning to yet another completely unknown life.

the pushing went pretty well, and before i knew it, my baby boy entered the world. as soon as he came out, i bawled. hard. not because i was so happy to see my baby, but because i was so happy it was over. in fact, when i first saw him i was disappointed. he looked so unfamiliar and uncute. it's not like i knew how he was going to look, but to me, this wasn't it. there was no hollywood-like moment of overwhelming joy. there was no "click." he was just there and it was over and — oh my god, am i still being stitched up?

funny, i didn't realize i was making a career change
from what i could tell, my new job in life was to keep this tiny baby human alive. i couldn't really think about anything else. well, except for the ridiculous amount of discomfort and pain that lingered around the lower half of my weird-looking body. i had decided that i wanted to breast feed him, and that was actually going pretty well, but i still couldn't handle the pressure of knowing that this life was now in my hands. forever.

i really wasn't looking forward to leaving the comfort of the hospital with all it's life-saving equipment and brilliant nurses who actually knew stuff about babies. the second night, amg stayed the night with me so my husband could go and get some sleep. this was beyond helpful, but equally depressing because she knew way more about my baby than i did. she did everything so effortlessly, like she was born to be a mom. and i wasn't.

taking my baby home and starting to permanently integrate him into my life didn't seem possible. i didn't have a vision of what that new life would look like, nor did i know what i wanted it to look like. all i really knew was that i was supposed to feed him, change him, burp him and try to get some sleep. and yet the one goal i had stuck in my mind was that i didn't want my child to ever feel unloved, abandoned, or unimportant. but how would i actually achieve that?

months went by and it seemed like my job went from keeping him alive to keeping him from crying while keeping him alive. it was all a sleepless blur and yet somehow, without my knowledge, i began to fall in love. i started to get to know my little munchkin man, and with each passing day, the dread of having to take care of him forever turned into an acceptance of my new life, then turned into comfort of being a member of this family, then turned into excitement of what will come next.

and then he smiled at me. my little man smiled at me. his mom... he smiled at me because i am his mom.

i never thought this day would come. i never thought i would be happy to consider myself a mom. i never thought i would be so excited to see a baby and hold him and snuggle him and kiss him and make him giggle, and yet here i am, blabbing on about my little munchkin man. so is motherhood for me? who knows. does my child feel loved and wanted? i sure hope so. do i regret having a baby, especially after knowing how hard it truly is? not for one second.