After being up for twenty-four hours in active labor and then giving birth, I needed to rest and did not prefer to have my baby in the room with me. (My hospital literally put a tracking device on Palmer’s ankle the second she was born, so I was never worried about her getting stolen or misplaced.) A delivery through your vag like I had is enough of a recovery, but a C-section is a whole different story. It’s a way longer recovery, more traumatic mentally and physically. So I bow down to women who had to go through that. I cannot imagine it. I can’t help but wonder if that feeling of total exhaustion and the expectation of a speedy recovery after the physical shock of labor contributes to high rates of depression and postpartum issues. I tried to find research on this and didn’t see much. However, according to the National Sleep Foundation, people who experience postpartum depression don’t sleep as well as those without this condition.
Jason was great when I was recovering, but I’ll never forget the nurses! Oh man, they deserve a shout-out. It’s these people who help put ice packs in your mesh undies, who clean up your poop and drain your pee bladder and talk you off the cliff. They do a job that most can’t, and I have so much respect for them. Nurses, GOD BLESS YOU!
Speaking of bladders, here’s a really funny story from the hospital. It’s also a little heads-up for those of you who are pregnant and get embarrassed easily. The morning after I had Palmer, my mom, her longtime partner of ten years, Mark, and Palmer’s godmother, my dear friend Anitha, came to visit me and see the baby. Everyone was oohing and ahhing over Palmer and taking their turns holding her while I was lying in bed, recovering and resting. A nurse came into the room and walked toward Palmer’s bassinet.
“Hi, everyone. I’m here to do Palmer’s required hearing test,” she said. I had no idea this was even a thing, but I guess it makes sense to confirm your child can hear before releasing him or her from the hospital.
“Everyone can stay in the room, but I need complete silence so we can properly administer the test,” the nurse added.
“No problem,” we all told her. Then she took little P over to the machine to begin the test.
“Okay, quiet, everyone,” she reminded us. This sounded simple enough, but then all of a sudden I had to pee. Badly. I couldn’t hold it. My catheter had just been removed and I had very little bladder control at this point. Well, turns out I had very little control of something else, too. I tried to make as little noise as possible as I hobbled to the bathroom when it started… I farted. Loud. Then another one and another one… and another. The complete silence of the room was totally shattered by a string of loud farts that sounded like a machine gun going off. There was nothing I could do. I just stood there, frozen… with both hands over my face, mortified beyond belief. The nurse got tickled and then I started chuckling. Anitha was laughing so hard that she was bent over in tears, and my mom and Mark couldn’t contain themselves, either. Needless to say, Palmer’s hearing test had to start over again.
Although my labor and childbirth were out-of-body experiences for me, the hospital saw them as about as routine as you could get. So thanks to what they called an “uncomplicated vaginal labor,” they released me from the hospital after only twenty-four hours. That’s ONE DAY! What the heck? Even though I was ready to get out of that hospital bed, it seemed a bit premature. Back when our moms and grandmas gave birth, they often hung out in the hospital for a whole week or more. After all, you are like a wounded bird and have to go through this major recovery, but you’re being sent home to care for an infant. All while having no idea what you’re doing! How insane. So it was a surreal feeling when my sweet nurse Lizzy rolled me out of the hospital in a wheelchair to our car. Wait, what? Is this it? There is no instruction manual? I thought. Nope, there is not. And without an instruction manual, I had my first failure of motherhood. It came when I tried to buckle Palmer into her infant car seat. I couldn’t figure out how to work the damn thing with all those straps, belts and buckles. Jason couldn’t figure it out either, and we both stood there sweating and practically tearing our hair out. I swear it felt like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube. So I FaceTimed my best friend Lynn, who had her first baby seven weeks before me. I knew she had the same car seat.
“HELP!” I cried. “What the heck do I do with this?” Luckily, Lynn talked me through it and, finally, we were on our way home with our precious cargo. Let the fun begin!
Chapter Seven THE NEW MOM DAZE & HAZE
There is something so magical about having a baby in the house. Time expands and contracts; each moment holds its own little eternity.
—MICHELLE OBAMA, MOTHER OF TWO
To say that life changes when you have a baby—especially your first one—is a major understatement, and for me, the adjustment to new motherhood was the hardest part. As you parents out there know, it’s not all puppies and rainbows, and I was rattled. The second night home from the hospital, I was lying in bed at 3 A.M. sobbing uncontrollably to Jason while he held me in his arms. “What have we done? Our life was so great,” I cried. “Why did we do this? Why did we ruin our life? I just want to sleep.” Looking back on this, I can’t help but chuckle. Today, I know that was just my hormones talking, but back then I wasn’t laughing. I was in a true fog for the first six to eight weeks after Palmer was born. Physically, it’s a shock to your system akin to Navy SEAL training. I did a lot of googling during those first weeks. One search was, “Is it normal to feel like you were hit by a truck after giving birth?” No joke. Not only was my crotch in pain from that pretty traumatic tear in my nether region, but my once exciting life was now diapers and breastfeeding 24/7. Luckily, it was just Palmer’s diapers by this point, not mine, too. It was a roller coaster going from total independence and focusing only on me, myself and I to Holy shit! I have a tiny human who relies on me for EVERYTHING. Her survival depends on me! That was scary.
A big post-pregnancy surprise was not really being able to walk for the first three days home (thanks to the tear in my perineum). My body felt the weakest it ever had in my life. I would have also loved a little warning about the stuff that emerges from your body during that first week. And there’s lots of it. (Sorry to be graphic, but I want to be real here. Somebody’s gotta tell you.) Convinced that I was dying, I called my ob-gyn and told her about all the bloody clots coming out of me. “As long as they’re smaller than a golf ball, you’re okay,” she said. A golf ball? What?
The day after we brought Palmer home, we had to take her back to the hospital to have her bilirubin levels checked because she had slight jaundice. Bilirubin is a yellow pigment that’s in red blood cells; it’s common for it to be high in newborns, but if it’s too high, in some cases it may indicate an underlying disease. That morning before we went back to the hospital, I took a shower—with Jason’s help—and actually blew my hair dry and put on makeup. The whole process was absolutely exhausting, but at the time I think I was trying to prove something to myself. I always saw photos of women holding their newborns and looking amazing on social media, and I didn’t want to roll up to the hospital with Palmer in my arms feeling defeated. This was the last time I put on makeup for a while. (Note to new moms: you don’t have anything to prove to anyone. You just had a baby!)
Jason parked as close as he could to the hospital entrance. But I was so weak that I couldn’t even walk the hundred feet from the car; he had to push me in a wheelchair. In my opinion, you really should have a handicap placard for at least the first week postpartum. Right? So I was weak and tired and wondering when the heck I’d feel connected to Palmer. Where’s the joyful elation that everyone talks about? The fireworks? The only emotion I’m having is panic. I was drained and exhausted and mad at Jason because he’s the one who got me pregnant. (Hey, I didn’t say I was being rational.) I also worried: What if that connection to her NEVER comes? I felt so guilty that I kept these feelings to myself.
Then about a week after we were home, I was rocking Palmer to sleep in the glider when she looked up at me. Her eyes met
mine. And then… she smiled! At that moment, something clicked. A wave of emotions came over me and, believe it or not, I cried. My heart is not cold and dead after all, I thought. I know it sounds cheesy, y’all, but it was a genuine overwhelming love that I didn’t feel immediately at the hospital. Now, I’m going to sound like the clichéd mom, so roll your eyes if you must, but that connection has evolved ever since, and I fall more in love with her every day.
That said, life was not mommy-blog perfect—and still isn’t now that she’s older. No, no, no. I never imagined how exhausting the first weeks would be. I saw all of these photos on social media of new moms smiling and holding their babies. Their hair was done with not a strand out of place, their makeup was perfect and they had the most ecstatic looks on their faces. I did NOT feel this way. Or look this way. (I could barely find time to pee; how did they find time to blow-dry their hair? Even the energy to swipe on lip gloss seemed monumental.) I once read a quote by Maria Shriver where she said that “comparing how you feel on the inside (bad) to the way someone else looks on the outside (great) is a losing proposition. It’s an impossible standard.” Let’s just say I was not your “typical” blissful new mom.
One reason was my case of depression after pregnancy, or postpartum depression. We are very aware of the physical changes of becoming pregnant and having a baby, but not so much of the mental changes that occur after we give birth. And if there was one thing I wish I had done more research on before having Palmer, it would have been this: How will I be affected mentally? Yes, we know we will gain weight, we might lose hair, our boobs will double in size and our hips will widen… but why aren’t we prepared for the HORMONES?
I do not think I had a major case of postpartum depression, and upon doing research, I might just have had what they call the baby blues. (Baby blues are short-term mood and emotional changes, while postpartum depression has more severe and long-lasting symptoms, which I’ll share shortly.) I never went to see anyone to get it professionally diagnosed, and it never got to the point where I felt like I should be medicated. However, I had many of the classic symptoms: I cried almost every day for six weeks. I felt like my life was over. I felt sad and like I had nothing to look forward to. I felt isolated and bored and bereft of my old life. I missed the spontaneity that I had before I became a mom, because now every day was Groundhog Day. I felt like I’d go crazy if I didn’t get out of the house, but I COULDN’T get out of the house. Having Palmer in mid-November, at the height of cold and flu season, made it reckless to go outside with a newborn. Plus, I was breastfeeding (but more on that in the next chapter). I tried to tell myself it was fleeting and that Palmer was going to grow up and someday turn into a self-sufficient asshole teenager, but it didn’t help. The depression was so strange because I had this little baby who I would fight a bear for and loved so much that it hurt, yet sometimes I would just hold her and sob. On paper, I had everything I could ask for, but I was still so sad. I felt regret—why did I do this to my easy life?—and I had resentment toward Jason—why can’t MEN breastfeed, too?—because the brunt of the responsibility landed on me. I felt very jealous that Jason got a break every day when he went to work. In fact, I felt like his life improved while mine had done a 180, which was frustrating. He would leave for work the same as he did before, and I was stuck at home alone with an infant.
When I had these feelings, I would tell myself, Cam! Wake up! There are women who would kill to be in your position. Of course, this made things even worse, because I felt guilty and petty to be thinking these thoughts. I am an anxious person by nature. I’ve never been medicated for it, but I probably should be. Typically, I am able to keep my anxiety at bay with a combo of breathing and meditation, but the anxiety that hit me after I gave birth was a whole new beast. It’s natural to worry about your baby… but I REALLY worried. I was not prepared to be so overprotective of my daughter. You go from having this baby living inside of you where you know they are safe to where all of a sudden they’re outside of you and you have such a loss of control. Not so great.
While I was experiencing my bouts of sadness, guilt and more sadness, I did know logically that what I was feeling was not really ME; it was all of the chemical changes taking place in my body. Somewhere deep inside I knew it would pass, and the little I knew about minor cases of postpartum depression was that my feelings were NORMAL. That knowledge came from some research and reading. Also, my mom had some postpartum depression after her pregnancy with me and had always been very open about it, so that helped me understand it as well. Honestly, that’s what got me through. Now, when I open up to women and say that I think I experienced this, more often than not they say, “You know what? I think I did, too.” And they probably did. According to one study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a whopping one in eight mamas in the United States experiences symptoms of postpartum depression. According to the American Psychiatric Association and the CDC, these symptoms include crying more often than usual, loss of pleasure in things you used to enjoy, eating more than usual or a lot less, anxiety or panic attacks, withdrawing from friends and family members, a sense of numbness or disconnection from your baby or disinterest in him or her, worry or fear that you’ll hurt your baby, having other scary thoughts, feelings of guilt that you’re a bad mom, feeling worthless, questioning whether or not you’ll be able to care for your little one, excessive anger and irritability, mood swings and trouble sleeping or sleeping too much.
An article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology said that postpartum depression is “underrecognized and undertreated.” I agree. This goes right along with my theory that there are actually a lot more women who experience postpartum than we think; most just don’t admit it for fear of being stigmatized. And many don’t even realize there’s a name for what they’re feeling. The good news is that the more we talk about it, the more we realize we’re not alone. Treatment options include long- or short-term medication and therapy, but other times the depression goes away on its own, like it did for me. After about six weeks, it resolved itself and I felt like I’d snapped out of it. I totally understand that’s not the case for everyone, so it’s helpful to mention your emotions when you go to your ob-gyn for your six-week checkup. Many doctors ask about your mental state at this appointment, but if your doctor doesn’t, just bring it up. You may feel awkward, but it certainly won’t be new to them. One important thing to note is that postpartum depression doesn’t always happen right after you deliver your bundle of joy. It can appear weeks or even months later. So be on the lookout and get help if you need it. Remember, you are NOT IN ANY WAY alone in this. All of us mamas are right there with you (as is postpartum.net).
I wish I’d heeded my own advice to get help. Trust me, as a mom you need a break. Friends and neighbors offered to come over and watch Palmer—even just to hold her for a few minutes—but I didn’t take anyone up on it because I didn’t want to be a burden and felt guilty. As I mentioned, I had Palmer in the middle of flu season, so I became a germaphobe and a hermit, afraid to have people over and afraid to take her out those first few weeks. But I was also too caught up in proving that I could do it all, which I think furthered my postpartum depression. What the heck was I thinking? Every single one of the women who reached out to me had children, too. They had been in my shoes. They could have helped and were eager to do so. It truly does take a village to raise a child, and the support needed for mental and physical stability is major. Around the two-month mark, I started allowing my mom to come over and watch Palmer so I could get out for a couple of hours. I made her read a baby care book before Palmer was born—after all, there is a family story about my mom dropping me on my head as a baby—and as of this writing, even though Palmer’s a toddler, I still have not let my mother drive her in the car. (Yikes. I know. I know.) Anyway, just being able to get out of the house and go to Target ALONE or sit in the parking lot of T.J.Maxx was like a Bahamas vacation. Sometimes I wouldn’t go anywhere. I would just drive
around and listen to music. Rap music. With cuss words. (A true rebel. I know.)
Another thing I didn’t expect to happen in those early days was that I’d turn into a horrible friend. Having a baby literally changes your brain chemistry. I’m not a scientist, but I swear it’s true! I actually read an article about how the matter in your brain physically morphs after cooking a kid. You’re so focused on this baby that you forget to focus on a lot of other things. I actually told all of my friends to please just accept the fact that I was going to be a horrible friend for the first few months. Eventually, you find balance and can manage having your own life while being a good mom, but it takes time.
Then, just to get a little superficial here, another surprise to me was that post-pregnancy hair loss is a thing. Yup, it is. I knew the thickness I’d gained while pregnant would subside, but my hair fell out in masses so big they clogged the drain. The Victoria’s Secret hair was fun while it lasted, but it was not so fun when I was shedding it like a dog. I really couldn’t wear ponytails because you could see the bald spots around the front of my hairline. It was embarrassing! Some of it did grow back, but not all of it. And how about peeing in your pants? I remember the first time I sneezed twice in a row and I legit peed myself enough that I had to change my clothes.
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