Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The bickering


The other day I read an article: 'Before I forget, what nobody remembers about new motherhood'. It was one of the most honest accounts of what happens right after you have a baby:

"...the post-partum experience (...) is immensely, bizarrely complicated. It is, at various times and for various people, grueling and joyful and frightening and beautiful and disorienting and moving and horrible. (...) It's hard to remember how distressing sleep-deprivation is when we're not actually experiencing it. It's hard to explain how upsetting it is when your baby cries.  You may find yourself a little weepy at the end of a cold, gray day in which you accomplished nothing but half a load of laundry, now moldering in the washer since the baby's surprisingly early awakening from her morning nap. You may find yourself unreasonably irritable when your partner calls to say that he or she is going to be home from work thirty minutes late."

I had read all kinds of books to try and prepare for what was going to happen. I read about childbirth, I read about breastfeeding, I read about French parenting strategies and about child development. But for some reason it didn't occur to me to read about how lack of sleep, tiredness and hormones would affect my mood, about the "biochemical forces moving within my body and beyond my control". 


I am not proud of this, but those first days were particularly hard because I got grumpy, I often snapped at the husband, at my mom, at anyone, really. I felt like I constantly had to prove whatever it is I was trying to say or else people wouldn't listen to me, wouldn't take me seriously. Mark and I had never really fought before. At the most, during simple discussions we would both go hang out to our own little corners of stubbornness for a couple of hours and then made up because being angry at each other was worse and less important than whatever it was we were arguing about.

It gets difficult when you have a child, a child whom you both love strongly and fiercely wish to protect, and then you don't really agree on how to do A or B or C. Simple stuff like "does she need an extra blanket?" or "well, I'll keep my sign there because I hate it when people touch her hands or face if I don't know they are clean" can turn into arguments.


It is something we are navigating together, something we are working on and getting better at with every day that passes. But I wish somehow, somewhere there had been a book, an article, someone that could have alerted me this was about to happen. That my mood was going to be dramatically affected, that my views on certain things were going to suddenly be very strong. All I can say now is that kindness, tolerance and being able to communicate are vital.Oh, and remembering that we are a team, that we are in this together, not against each other on a competition to see who is right. Of course we knew this, but we had not really had to live it.

Has this happened to you or am I crazy?

8 comments:

  1. I haven't been there, but I'm pretty acutely terrified of it. I expect that parts (all?) Of new motherhod are going to be more awful than I can reasonably expect and just the idea of losing myself and how much I'm giving up living my life the way I want to I am giving up. Mostly though I've got a prepare for the worst mindset and hope for the best mindset, but it's difficult to wrap my head around it when being a mother is so outside of thealm of anuthing I have ever experienced.

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    1. You will do fine. I thought relationship-wise, that infertility had taught us. It was the unexpected part of this that hit me... I did not count on the effect tiredness and hormones, and feeling so strongly about things would have on us. But it is just a matter of communicating.

      You will certainly won't lose yourself. You just, readjust, and it can be hard to find a new normal, it takes some time, but it will happen, and you can do it.
      And it will be so nice :)

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  2. Well, the internet ate my comment, so here is the short version: you are not crazy, and we are and have been dealing with the bickering as well. I think the sleep deprivation and the continuous tiredness is a big reason for us, and it's time for me to go to sleep. :)

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    1. Yes, the tiredness is a huge reason. I hope we get used to this new phase and that it will get better.

      I also have to force myself to sleep... so many things to do, and yet, you need to rest.

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  3. I don't think you're crazy at all! We haven't been bickering here, but I'll admit to feeling a wave of resentment when I get up all night to feed her, and he stays in bed because he's got to work in the morning and...right now I don't. He changes a ton of diapers when he's home and watches her but he's also in grad school so he has schoolwork to do at home and....I don't. So a lot more is falling to me than it might if we were a little more equally burdened. It's totally fine during the day but at night it's ROUGH to not feel like it's a tiny bit unfair that he can't cuddle her a bit. :( So...I feel you on the troubling feelings from time to time and all that. Hang in there!

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    1. Yup, it will all be fine. It is not so much resentment (though, sometimes a bit, but a big part of that is just Biology) but how we sometimes have different views on her needs (eg. the cold thing I wrote about the other day) and that being tired makes me grumpy and snappy (not proud, trying to control that).

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  4. Yes! I find it especially difficult because in our case, two cultures are colliding and it was never more apparent until we brought Paloma home. I think it's so great that you are speaking truthfully about this. I bet so many women go through this and don't talk about it. The first few weeks (months?) of parenthood is definitely not all bliss and at first I felt guilty for not being on cloud 9 all the time, until I realized that other Moms were feeling the same way.

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    1. Oh yes, so much of this is cultural. And yeah, I had no idea this was a common thing to go through, I somehow never managed to read about this or imagined it.

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