Moving Mountains

Four years ago, I gave birth to a red, wrinkly, slightly cone-headed baby boy, who was covered in baby acne and whose skin was peeling because he had cooked an extra week.  Even after months of reading baby books, I was unprepared.  Overwhelmed.  Lost.  Terrified.

We brought Junior home on Christmas eve.  I still had 30+ staples in my stomach, but I didn't want to stay in the hospital another night.  I wanted to have our first Christmas at home, and the nurse I had kept telling me I was fat.  Seriously.  I mean, I was fat before I got pregnant, and pregnancy certainly wasn't a slimming process for me, and I had just given birth.  I didn't need to hear it.  I was living it.  Fuck that nurse.  I went home.

My boobs hurt.  My incision was a fiery brand between my pelvis and my now-soft, empty stomach.  I felt worse not-pregnant than I had ever felt pregnant.  My son wasn't sleeping.  He was sleeping too much.  My husband had to help me pull my pants up because bending over was agony.  I took a pain pill my first evening home, fell asleep holding the baby, and woke up just as he tumbled off my lap, rolled down my legs, and landed in a heap of tangled blanket at my feet.  I had dropped my fucking baby.  My milk didn't come in for 5 days.  I couldn't do this.  Why did I do this?

We had visitors.  My husband took a picture of me with a digital camera and showed me.  I went to the bedroom and leaned against the wall and cried until the visitors left, awkward and silent.  

I cried a lot, as a matter of fact.  I was tired, I didn't feel good, I had given birth but nursing my newborn was far more taxing than pregnancy those first few weeks.  And I was ashamed.  I loved my son, sure - but I had yet to feel a connection to him.  I tried to will it to come.  I would nurse him, concentrate on him, the heft of him in my arms, the sweet curve of his body, the smell of his head.  But it was all so abstract.  I cried more.  I would have never done anything to hurt my baby, but if someone had offered me a couple of thousand bucks for him, I would have had to sit down and seriously consider their offer.

I became an avid sleeping baby watcher.  Not because I was enamored of him, but because I became convinced that God knew I didn't love my baby enough, and that He would take him from me.

Honestly, I should have asked for help.  Much of it was hormonal, and beyond my control, and even though I had skimmed the sections in books on postpartum, it still never occurred to me that I was suffering from it.  Because I did only skim them - when I was pregnant, I couldn't imagine not having an immediate, soul-deep connection to the miracle I was growing inside me.  I already loved him, you know?  I was already in love with him.  I had no idea that the reality of him would be so different, and so much harder, than the concept of him.

But I got better.

Because all though I was all full of doubt about me as a mother (and still am, all the time), my son was not.  He had confidence in me.  Six weeks into motherhood, when I got up at 3 a.m. for yet another marathon nursing method, I finally felt it.  I settled down on the couch with him, got him latched on, and watched him nurse.  I sang to him, because singing was what moms were supposed to do, and you see, I did all the things that moms were supposed to do, even when I didn't feel like doing them, and he pulled back from my breast and gave me a gummy, unformed smile before stuffing my boob back in his mouth.  But even as he was nursing, he struggled to keep eye contact with me.  I smiled, and he would smile, and smiling made him lose his latch, and I would laugh.  

And I realized that, finally, I finally felt it.  He went from being a burden to a gift, and we never looked back.

I bathed him not because the baby books suggested it, but because I loved washing each tiny toe and finger, loved wrapping him up in a fluffy towel fresh from the drier and inhaling his scent as he nursed.  I sang to him not because I felt I was supposed to, but because he loved it, and I loved that he loved it.  And as he grew, each age was the best age, and four years later, that still holds true.  Age one was perfection, two was amazing, three was even better, but so is four - four will be the best age, too.

I love my son.  I realize that makes me exactly the same as almost every other mother in the world, but still, our love is always special, isn't it?  Even that most universal of loves - the love we have for our children.  And we don't even think about it that much, because concentrating on it, examining it, makes us realize anew just exactly how amazing and powerful that love is, and seriously - who has time for that shit?  But we should take some time, every once in awhile, to reflect on it.  It's a love that makes us incredibly vulnerable, weak at the knees and humbled before it.  But it's also a love that makes us strong, too - it is the love that will literally move mountains, if that mountain stands between us and something we want for our children.  

I see all of you moving mountains.  The mom who takes her daughter to dance, even though she is sick and she is tired.  The mom who, with a stab of fear in her heart, watches her son run out on the football field the first time and covers her fear with a smile.  The mom who stays up all night to hold her sleeping child's hand because she is sick, and even though holding her hand won't reduce her fever, it makes you both feel better.  The mom who takes her child to take his driver's test, her daughter to buy her first formal, who puts her five-year old on the bus for the first time and watches him go out into the world and manages to wave happily until he is out of sight before bawling.  The mom who stays up until 1 a.m. making 28 cupcakes for her child's school party. The mom who stays home to be with her babies, the mom who goes out to work to take care of her babies...  

The moms who make mistakes, and lay awake at night worrying.  The moms who second guess everything they're doing, because they want to do it right, the moms who, in a moment of stress and temper, lose their shit and have to lock themselves in the bathroom to cry.  The moms who do the things that we're supposed to do, when they are the last things in the world we feel like doing, when even the act of doing them makes you feel lost, overwhelmed, terrified...

Mountain movers, all of you.

So although I have many regrets for those first 6 weeks of my son's life - mostly over missed opportunities, my inability to enjoy my newborn, my firstborn - I now have the perspective to understand that even when I was filled much more with fear and resentment than anything else, I was doing my best to not show it, to act in love, even if it felt false and stilted and scripted at first, even though it exhausted me and frightened me, and that, in itself, was love.  I can't change it, but I know in my heart that I would if I could, and that today, the one thing I never doubt - even when I am doubting everything else - is that I love my son, with the whole entirety of my heart.

And frankly, I also regret not punching the nurse that called me fat 18 hours after giving birth.