Levedy

Got Milk?

So I’ve been a parent for a whole week, and I’ve managed not to accidentally leave the baby in the refrigerator or to put a diaper on her head.

Yet.

I’ve totally fallen in love with the little Bean. I could stare at her for hours. I don’t mind her shitting all over me. Twice. Right after I got out of the shower. My first shower in two days: Still. Not. Bitter.

The little Bean sleeps most of the day. She’s up every two hours at night. She’s beautiful and funny and we’ll be starting calculus tutoring in a week.

My recovery continues on apace. I have a few stitches “down there,” but I’m honestly not sure where, and frankly, I’m too frightened to put a mirror down under to find them. The nurse’s after care instructions are enough to scare anyone:
-No douching
-No thinking about douching
-No sex (Ha! As If!)
-No scrubbing with soap
-No scrubbing with anything resembling a sponge, cloth, glove, or pouf
-No baths
-No thinking about baths
-No powders, lotions, potions, or salves other than witch hazel
-No feeding it after midnight

My main source of anxiety has been with breast feeding. After a particularly nasty encounter with the nursery nurse, I have been stark-raving paranoid about starving the Bean with my hideously malformed teats.

The nurse (A nurse! A professional!) expressed horror that I hadn’t successfully nursed the baby in the first seven hours of her being topside. I tried to nurse her many times, but a barely six pound baby is no match for the, ahem, udder massivity (bad, I know) that is my breastage. She intimated that the Bean’s health would be in danger if I didn’t feed her formula RIGHT AWAY, EVEN 20 milliliters FOR GOD’S SAKE! CONSIDER THE CHILD! All of my reading on the subject telling me otherwise went right out the window because a professional baby nurse was telling me that I was starving my child and she hadn’t even had a chance to see the outdoors yet!

So I fed her formula, cried my eyes out, and felt like a total failure. Wow, that only took seven hours.

So I checked out of the hospital in 24 hours, figuring that if the Bean was going home with the most retarded mother in the world, we might was well check out early to get a jump on things. Dim, the Bean, and I locked ourselves in the house and spent hours staring at each other. Our highly evolved and sophisticated natures came up with incredibly deep thoughts like:
“Wow. She’s really here.”
“We made that”
“I can’t believe that came out of me.”
“She looks like Captain Picard.”
“Or Wilford Brimley.”
“Yeah. Or him.”

Nursing her is incredibly hard. Harder than any of the books tell you. I don’t have perfect boobs like the skinny bitches. I don’t even have interestingly inverted nipples like the “Other women” the books all devote, oh, ONE FUCKING PARAGRAPH TO. My little Bean shrieks from hunger and all I can do is try to pinch my horribly engorged and yet maddeningly uncooperative teats into her teensy, tiny mouth. She can’t latch on to that which refuses to be latched on to. I try and try and try and she screams and screams and screams, and I end up dosing her with formula or pumped breast milk just so I know she doesn’t die by morning. She sleeps soundly and I cry myself into a catnap until the process starts again two hours later.

The La Leche League Lady I called told me that my problem was really that I had DARED to give the baby a pacifier to calm her down, and unless I wanted to be bailing my kid out of jail down the line for a string of crimes that can be traced back to the PRESENCE OF SILICONE IN HER MOUTH AS AN INFANT, I would cease that silly behavior immediately.

My friends and mothers all try to be helpful by telling me how they had it hard because it took, like, a whole two tries to get their kids latched on, and golly, wasn’t it stressful to not be able to figure it out for like ten whole minutes and what a scary ten minutes it was.

I swear that if I hear one more “be patient” or “it just takes time” I’ll scream. It shaves a little piece of skin off me each time she cries, knowing that I have these two giant beasts waiting to feed her but neither the skill nor the physiology to do it solo yet. The hospital lactation nurse's advice of "just shove it in there, you'll figure it out" seems advice better given to someone being asked to ram her own fist in her ass. Listen sister, if it would make it so I could feed the Bean, point me to the Vaseline...

I found a silicone shield that I can use to force my nipple into a shape that the baby can take. The websites all tell me that this is a hollow victory, since it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t latch her on to me, and it dulls sensation, so unless I continue to pump, I’ll dry up faster than a summer mud puddle in the savannah.

In four days I’ve already burned out one breast pump, and the other one looks scared.

I’ll keep at it, because I love the Bean more than I do myself. And how could you not? She looks like Captain Picard.

UPDATE: Post-Partum Depression Jen has been placed in a cage. Hopefully future posts will be limited to discussions of Coochie-coos and butterflies.

UPDATED UPDATE: PPD-Jen has clubbed Coochie-coo Jen. Discussions of tits and the paralells between her perineum and The Gremlins will likely continue. Adjust your reading habits accordingly.

Posted by Jen at April 29, 2006 1:50 PM