(And no, I don’t think Hallmark has a figurine for this one. Yet.)
Despite the fact that I was carrying the Little Man around inside me for nine months, nurturing him, protecting him, altering my entire body to accommodate him, I felt like more of an incubator than a mother that entire time. Mostly because the majority of what was going on was So completely out of my hands. I was not consulted about the how/when/where of the stretching of my abdomen, nor was I asked if I could please turn up the hormone levels in my body to..I don’t know, give my embryo his first mood swing? Or if I was, it must have been during that first trimester. The one I slept through.
Even come the day of his birth, there wasn’t much I had to actually do to facilitate it. Other than show up. Since the Little Man’s head (not to mention the rest of him) was so huge that he couldn’t actually fit into the birth canal, we delivered via scheduled C-Section. So there was no sweating, grunting, screaming, pushing, or cursing to be done on my end of things. All I had to do was try not to vomit on the anesthesiologist while he adjusted my Happy drugs.
And after the Little Man arrived? It still didn’t seem real. Me? A mother? Please. That sounds more like the beginning of a joke than a true statement.
Then came Day Three. The day when I was finally able to get up out of bed on my own and walk the ten feet to the bathroom unaccompanied. (Which doesn’t sound like a big deal, until someone has stretched out and then cut through every single ab muscle you’ve ever had, rendering them completely useless.)
I had two big goals for the day: Breastfeed my child, and Poo.
Yup. We were aiming high.
Especially considering that neither had happened since before I’d delivered. (Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you…) The Little Man had shown about as much interest in eating as my bowels had in evacuating themselves. The combination of swollen boobies and bowels was becoming a tad…urgent…to say the least.
Which, naturally, meant that the two events would coincide EXACTLY. And Equally urgently.
After hours of trying to coax the Little Man to eat, I suddenly realized that if I stayed in bed one more minute, I’d be sitting in a pile of my own poo. And since that hadn’t happened since at least 1st grade, I jumped out of bed and dashed to the bathroom. By which I mean I spent the next 5 minutes hobbling over to the bathroom door about as fast as an inchworm on dry pavement.
And JUST as I reached the door? The Little Man decided it was time to eat. RIGHT. THAT. SECOND.
Having spent three days waiting for him to show the slightest interest in nourishment of any kind, there was no way I was going to make him wait a minute longer than absolutely necessary.
Except I had to poo. RIGHT. THAT. SECOND.
So I? Did what came naturally. I grabbed the kid in a football hold with one hand, and dropped trou with the other.
And at that moment?
I finally felt like a mother.
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