Unexpected Mothering Fail: The Breastfeeding Breakdown

The lovely ladies at Momalom are hosting a contest for the good peeps at 3sprouts.com (a site chock full of baby items so adorable you’ll have to stop looking after 30 seconds because you will have annoyed yourself by how many times you’ve said “awwwwww!”), wherein they’ve challenged mamas to write about something unexpected we’ve encountered during our mothering journey.

Most participants have penned (computered?) beautiful tales of the joy they’ve experienced as mothers: the magical moment the baby you’ve been waiting forty weeks to meet finally arrives, the excitement over his first smile, the surprise at your capacity to adore something so noisy and often quite smelly. Those things are all true and wonderful (the old “you can’t imagine how much you can love someone till you become a mother!” adage may be cliche, but the sickeningly sweet sentiment is 100% accurate), and I assure you I share their joy – but I fully expected to love my baby with all my heart and to take great pleasure in all the little wonders. When asked what I didn’t expect to encounter in my new role as Mama, the first thing that popped into my mind was my complete and utter hatred of breastfeeding (AKA “my first complete and utter failure as a mother”).

Above: a scene from The Innocent Nursing Days (which lasted approximately 72 hours), i.e. the time before I came down from my new-mom-everything-is-wonderful high and realized I did not enjoy this activity, not one bit, not even with a canine companion and an iPhone with the Words With Friends app installed at my side.

True Love is a 28-Year-Old Sharing Their Baby Blanket (with an actual baby)

Listen, Hollywood. We can’t all look like models, or have giant boobs (unless we’re breastfeeding… have I mentioned how awesome that was?), or vacation in St. Bart’s, or date George Clooney. Some of us just look like regular people and date regular guys and have blankets from childhood that we’re totally obsessed with and dependent upon. We’re NORMAL PEOPLE, okay?!

What? You don’t all have baby blankets that you continue to take with you wherever you go (from room to room in the house and on actual vacations)? Blankets whose importance have been so deeply impressed upon your husband that he has promised to rescue it above all else in the event of a fire? Blankets that you take with you in your carry-on bag because you can’t risk the airline losing your baggage? Blankets you once referred to as “more important than you” to an ex-boyfriend, causing a serious fight (this actually happened! I wasn’t joking, either – Quilty was FAR more important to me than he was. I wonder why that relationship didn’t last?)?

The Mayor of Wrongville: My Inauguration

The day in your pregnancy when you finally look undeniably pregnant (when that wretched “is she preggo or just a little fat?” stage is finally over), every woman who ever had a child, read about someone having a baby, caught an episode of “A Baby Story” on TLC, or played with a doll as a little girl comes out of the woodwork to offer you advice.

An endless barrage of tips and suggestions coming at you from every angle may sound obnoxious, but since I was nearly paralyzed with fears about virtually every aspect of pregnancy and impending motherhood (I recall a tearful, panicked conversation with my mom when I was about 6 months along when I cried “how will I know when to feed him??”), I welcomed input (and reassurance) from pretty much anyone! I received lots of sage advice, like “um… you’ll figure out when he’s hungry. I promise. *cough* crazy lady *cough*.”

Since having Ry Ry, I’ve had a couple preggo friends ask me if I, as a newly certified Expert, had any words of wisdom I could share with them before they joined the Wonderful World of Motherhood (at least, that’s what I pretend happened – I’m pretty sure all they actually did was say hello and then I bombarded them with unsolicited “help.” Sorry, ladies. Overeager.) Their interest (humor me) made me reflect on everything I’ve experienced in the last five and a half months and how things compare now to what I thought things were going to be like before the kid actually arrived.

After filling them in on some practical tips that I believe every mother should be tipped off about prior to giving birth (e.g.: if you are even considering an epidural – and seriously, why aren’t you – forget what everyone says about waiting the early stages out at home and get your ass to the hospital STAT; also, splurge on awesome sweatpants cuz that’s all you’ll want to wear for months), I realized there was one piece of advice I never heard that really would have come in handy:

A Delicious and Nutricious Meal for Baby!

Bubba is almost six months old now, which means that in addition to the $92,713 worth of formula he consumes each day, he is also officially allowed to gorge on all the rice cereal he wants.

I was VERY excited to get the go-ahead from the doctor on this. I had visions of him smiling like the Gerber baby with a few adorable specs of mush dotting his adorable little face – I had the photos mentally posed! I was also thrilled to have one more thing with which to occupy him in the evening; by about 5:30 every day, he’s too tired to play (take a nap, dude!) but it’s obviously far too early for bed, so I end up trying to stretch a bath and a bottle into a two hour ordeal (that bath is THOROUGH and he enjoys a full spa treatment of nail-trimming, diaper cream, baby lotion, and hair brushing afterwards – aren’t you jealous??) to bring us to a bedtime that won’t result in a 5am wakeup call.

Unfortunately, “as much rice cereal as he wants” is precisely none. The look on his face when I try to give it to him is priceless, but sadly not in the joyous way I had envisioned. It’s more along the lines of the look you might get if you served Chef Eric Ripert rotten sushi while at the same time telling him some terrible, soul-crushing news (perhaps that I like McDonald’s better than his fancy fare?).

The kind of look that says: “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME THIS IS TERRIBLE THIS DOES NOT BELONG IN MY MOUTH IT CANNOT POSSIBLY BE FOOD FOOD COMES FROM A BOTTLE OR MAYBE FROM BOOBS ACCORDING TO MY DISTANT MEMORIES DO YOU NOT KNOW ANYTHING AT ALL?!??!”

Seriously, you’d think I was poisoning the kid.

So the rice cereal is on hold for now – we’ll try again in a few weeks. In the meantime, we did find something he liked that doesn’t come from a bottle:

Cry It Out Update: I Am Not a Monster

When we last met, baby was trolling me with his newfound poor sleep habits (admittedly, I may have been partially to blame by giving in and letting him sleep with me approximately every night) and fatigue and peer pressure from the hubbins had finally convinced me to try some Cry It Out (the horrors!).

I know parents have been letting their kids cry in bed for eons and obviously most people turn out relatively fine (I have no research to back this up, but I’m certain Ted Bundy’s woes did not stem from a five minute stint in his crib as a sobbing five month old. Pretty sure, anyway). And Bubba’s own doctor – herself a mother of two happy and healthy children (according to her, anyway – I have not done any independent research to confirm that one, either!), has been recommending letting the baby cry a wee bit so he can learn to fall asleep on his own since he was 8 weeks old. We actually did give it a half-hearted attempt for a little while, but it was so hard (for me – TFW has a heart of stone when it comes to Cry It Out) to hear him cry and seemed so much easier to just go in there right away, we kinda (totally) gave up rather quickly.

My concern over committing to CIO was threefold:

The Games Are Over: Cry It Out, Night 1

Remember when I introduced myself, and I casually mentioned that the baby sleeps through the night? Like it was no big deal?

Ha. Ha.

The baby  – clearly a super-genius/troll – somehow managed to read that post, then sprung into action hatching a plot to make me choke on those words.

“How cute you are, Mama, with your adorably naive presumptions!”

48 Hours Without Daddy: Mama’s Report Card

TFW had to jet out of town for a family event last weekend, leaving me and the baby to fend for ourselves for 48 straight hours (he’s back, in case any serial killers are reading this and considering coming over to attack me. Missed your chance!). I’m alone with the baby all the time while daddy works and whatnot, so I figured it’d be no big deal – 48 hours will go by in a flash! Other than my fear of serial killers (as well as rapists, robbers, kidnappers, and other miscreants of their ilk – I watch a lot of Investigation Discovery), I wasn’t too concerned about handling baby by myself for the weekend.

Obviously, since I am writing this post, things were a bit trickier than I had anticipated.

Punk Rock Card: Revoked!

I fancy myself to be a “punk rock” chick, not just in terms of musical taste or style (sidenote: in case anyone was wondering, shockingly enough, both of my torso tattoos survived the pregnancy beautifully! Ask me again how they look in 10 more years…), but as a life philosophy: individuality, questioning authority, and of course, confidence in oneself and not caring what others think.

Unfortunately, since having the baby, I’ve realized that I have become a disgrace to the punk rock community (is there even one anymore? What year is it now?) in terms of the whole “not caring what other people think” thing. Over the past five months, I’ve discovered that I do care what people think of me as a mother. A LOT.

The Crazy Files, Volume II: Ryan’s Rolling Results in Reduced Rest (for Mama)

Ry Ry has been rolling over for a while now, but until a couple weeks ago it was just an occasional and essentially accidental occurrence (always accompanied by an adorable look of bemusement on his face – “What the… how did I end up here?! And why is Mom so excited about it?”). Eventually he got the hang of the trick and realized he could actually perform this feat on purpose, which came in handy (for him) when he was sick of being on his belly, but it wasn’t until last week that he made a life changing (for both of us) discovery: rolling around can actually get you places!

We’ll get to why this exciting development is driving me crazy in a moment, but first, check out how freakin’ cute it is (and yes, he really is this deliriously happy just about all the time):

Sometimes I’m Not Crazy

With my first post revealing that I regularly make like Edward Cullen and watch my child sleep, and the next expressing my totally reasonable conjecture that my being a working mom is dooming my child to resent not only me but the entire female gender for the rest of his life, a stranger reading this (if there were any) could fairly assume I am either a) wholly uptight, b) a big bundle of no-fun, c) mentally ill, or d) all of the above.

I’m here tonight to provide evidence to the fact that, contrary to what my myriad fears may have you believe, I am in fact a surprisingly laid-back gal in many ways. Remember, most of my craziness is in my head – I try to keep the anxiety snuggly (and healthily!) tucked in the deep recesses of my brain for late-night mulling-over. In most of my daily interactions with the baby, I’m surprisingly similar to a Normal Person!