a six month retrospective - month one

I've already posted about the day that Evey was born. But I didn't write down much more of what happened after that. Those 1st couple weeks were extremely difficult for me. Having to set an alarm to wake up every 2 hours to feed Evey was hard. Then having her take an hour to eat was hard. Feeling full of milk and full of extra weight was hard. Not being able to sit up in bed without help was hard. I stood in the shower one day and cried. I said a prayer in which I said that I would go through her birth a hundred more times if I didn't have to go through those early weeks. I didn't know what to do and no one could help me. As my mother put it, "You're the mom now." Because no one was expecting for me to have a c-section, no one was really prepared for the recovery. I didn't change Evey's diaper until she was 2 weeks old. When she cried she was brought to me. I didn't really have to tend to her needs and the thought of doing so overwhelmed me. It sounds harsh, but when she cried, I felt nothing. I just felt like I was going through the motions of motherhood. I realize now that I had more than just a case of the "baby blues."

I talked to my sister Allie a lot. She'd had a c-section before and she told me that only women who have had them will understand what it's like. She said that when you stand up for the 1st time after, it's a badge of honor. Other people kept telling me that having children was just the best thing ever and they swore that it got better. When I went back to the midwives for our 1st post-birth check-up, I asked my mother to wait in the lobby. Val came into the room and asked me, "How are you doing?" I just sobbed. "It's so hard," I cried, "and not in the ways that I thought it would be." We talked and she suggested getting outside and talking a walk everyday and talking some B vitamins. We talked about J and how paranoid I was that each morning he left for work would be the last time I would see him alive. It was a fear that kept me up at night. She again promised me that motherhood would get better. When she weighed Evey to see if her weight had returned, we found that it had, and then some. I cried in relief - I wouldn't have to wake her up to eat anymore.

When Evey was almost 2 weeks old I asked Allie how on earth she did it. She has 3 kids (and now pregnant with her 4th - woohoo!!). I said that I felt out of control. She said, "Set the schedule." She gave her kids a bath every night to help them get into a pattern of night time vs. day time. J and I thought she was a genius. We got everything ready that night and gave Evey a bath, then I nursed her and put her in her crib. She still woke up a couple times that night, and for the next 2 nights, but holy crap, by the third night she slept from 8pm until 1am! It was such a blessing for us to get at least a 4 hour stretch of sleep.

The heat of those 1st 2 weeks was almost unbearable. Me and J and my mom and Evey went to the mall at night just to walk around somewhere with air conditioning. It was so so hot. But things were starting to improve. The next 2 weeks were filled with walks in the neighborhood, trips to Costco, baby acne (Evey had it so bad), blown out diapers, and sticking with that bath time routine. On her 1 month birthday we took a trip to Whidbey Island. She slept almost the whole way. Though I didn't totally feel like myself at that point, it felt like it was close.