7
The First Few Days
What Hit Me?
We spent the first days staring into our son’s blue eyes, while he scanned our hairlines and talked to spirits in the sunbeams.
When we arrived home from the hospital, we were greeted by a four-foot stork on our front lawn. Its cartoon thought-bubble proudly exclaimed, “It’s a Boy!” Taped to our front door was a cheery “Welcome Home, Bean!” sign. A huge bouquet of multicoloured helium balloons waved enthusiastically from our porch.
Although I have no memory of this, I am told that when I saw all these celebratory messages, I burst into hysterical sobs, repeating, “It’s a boy. It’s a boy. It’s a boy” while crying, laughing; delighted and touched.
Our uber-tenant, Dawn, the witness to this moment, admits now to being a little concerned for my mental stability. I was simply amazed that people could be so thoughtful, and that I had to go through so much pain when a stork could have delivered him all along!
When we got inside, we immediately realized that something was missing. There was no evidence of the mess of labour. Some brave souls had cleaned the vomit, blood, and amniotic fluid from the floor, changed the sheets and made the bed. The fridge and freezer had been cleaned out and stocked. Angels had been at work.
For the next few months, the angels kept us going. Our wonderful community, friends, and especially our family would pop by with homemade cookies, frozen burritos, Chinese food, flowers. Teresa made veggie curry. Shoshana made muesli that we ate every morning. Sonja and Deb brought fresh blackberries from their garden. These weren’t friends that we saw every week, but generous and excited people who welcomed the baby and smoothed the first few months in ways that they can never know.
SPIRITS IN THE SUNBEAMS AND OTHER SURPRISES
The only thing more beautiful than people’s kindness was the baby himself, k’nein a hora. We were knocked out by the sweetness of his cooing, his scent, his attempts to communicate. He seemed so peaceful, so wise. Then, in the evening of the first day, our placid angel had a sudden, violent session of kicking and bucking, slapping, and yowling. Uh oh. We were at a loss. Janis lay both her arms on either side of his body, and put her face right next to his. “Shhh shh, my baby,” she whispered. He calmed instantly, and let one rip.
The newborn’s porous digestive systems is what will make the first three months an expedition into the world of gas liberation. The midwives recommended that when our baby displayed signs of being gassy, instead of whacking his back to burp him, we gently press upward along his spine, kneading the gas up as opposed to shaking it up. Another nifty trick was bringing their knees up to their chest and rolling the legs in a little circle. It just looks like it would make them feel better. I would pay a lot for someone to do this to me. The midwives also suggested that we lay the newborn, tummy down, on our knees, so that gas could pass out through either end. These are now methods that I employ for myself and they work spectacularly well. Maybe that’s why one of my son’s first sentences was “Mama … fart.”
Our fellow laughed in his sleep on his third day on earth. We were floored. What on earth could be funny already? The wacky birth canal? That hilarious receiving blanket? Or maybe those goofy plants that winked at him in the breeze.
Newborns can only see black and white, so anything with major contrasts excites them and draws them in. Once we got wise to this, we wore checkerboard everything and played with shadows. I’m sure there are moms out there who do the full-on Goth look. I understand. After working so hard to bring him into the world you want to make sure that he’s more interested in you than the damn mobile.
Besides staring at him adoringly while he was asleep or awake, our major preoccupations in the first week were breastfeeding and adjusting to sleeplessness. The first night home alone with the baby, he woke up every two hours, and he stayed awake from 1:30 to 3:30 a.m. Welcome, Bean. Now let me explain a concept that we here on earth call night.
AND YOUR NAME IS?
Before we could turn him into a diurnal being, we had to know what to call him. We were given some forms to fill out when we left the hospital, including one for his birth certificate and one for the Child Tax Credit (a monthly government stipend, presumably a reward for not going insane and running out on your kid). For both, we needed to put down our child’s name. Janis and I had worked out middle, last, and Hebrew names, a tall order given our unique familial situation. But we couldn’t decide on the first. We were torn between two. The second name choice, Benjamin, had arrived late on the scene, but was making headway. We left the hospital with him unnamed and gave ourselves a deadline of two days.
On the second day after the birth I just knew. I looked at Janis square in the eyes and said, “He’s not Benjamin.”
“Okay, sweetie,” she said, already by rote.
“He’s Eli.” I asserted, tears welling. “That’s who he is.”
“Okay, sweetie,” Janis whispered to us both. “Welcome, Eli.”
We kept Benjamin as a middle name. (Since then, I’ve noticed that Benjamin is the bridesmaid of names – always the middle never the first.) Benjamin in Hebrew translates as “son of the right side.” We thought it was appropriate. Eli used to lie facing the right in utero, he was born with his head turned to the right, and he tore the f$#@ out of the right side of my labia.
In Hebrew, Eli means ascension, enlightenment in a spiritual way. It also means “my God.” Before we had the baby, we thought that was a little religiously bald, a titch spot-on. After going through the miracle of childbirth and nursing, it seemed about right.
DID ANYONE GET THE LICENCE OF THAT TRUCK?
I was blindsided by the effects of childbirth. I had no idea that I would feel like I had just been hit by a car. This sentiment was echoed by almost every woman I spoke with. Many were furious that no one told them how incredibly debilitating birth can be.
It was partially my fault. The first day we were home, we had many visitors. We were so high on new love that we let everyone come and stay as long as they liked. Although it was a trial to go up and down the stairs, and Janis encouraged people to come up to me, I went down a few times to join in living-room conversation. I was trying to be a hip mama. Sittin’ there, chilled out, kicking back with my babe. In my bathrobe. Perched on an ice pack. With my stomach like a sack of jam. And my stitched-together Frankenstein Vajuj.
The following morning I could barely move. My stomach muscles were unable to collect themselves well enough to get me to a sitting position without help. My legs were wobbly, head achy, and mind numb. However, I did enjoy stretching out on my stomach again. After nine months, it was delightful to loll about like a seal without anything between my tummy and the sheets. Except those red-hot, swollen tah-tahs …
Here’s another little secret. Because of stitches, wiping with toilet paper can be painful, unproductive, and unhygienic. So, I was given a peri-bottle. Peri is for perineum. A Peri-bottle is a water bottle that has a spout with lots of holes, so it can spray in a wider area. Basically, it’s a sprinkler for your hoo-haw. Fill it with warm water, and let me tell you, it feels great. Many women confided to me that they hung on to that thing long after the stitches were out. It just felt so damn good.
If you have a tear or an episiotomy, your stitches will be pretty uncomfortable. The huge pad you wear for bleeding will make you walk like you just got off a horse. I didn’t realize that I would need the mega-sized pad because I would continue to bleed heavily for six weeks.
In many cultures women “lay in” for forty days. They are cared for, fed, and given useful instruction by elder women. They get relief in dealing with their newborns so that they too can heal. In our culture, many spouses go back to work after two weeks, leaving an exhausted, traumatized, and depleted mom to care for her baby alone, pushing her dangerously close to postnatal depression.
BABY BLUES
Almost every woman I’ve spoken with had a bout of what is cutesily referred to as “baby blues.” My experience with postnatal depression was shocking, but relatively minor. It appeared sporadically in the first few days and it involved sprawling naked on the bed echoing tonelessly, “I feel nothing.” I wasn’t able to display an ounce of joy. Yet, hours later, my happy-cup overflowed when I held my son and he looked into my eyes with been-here-before wisdom.
“I put on eighty pounds during my pregnancy. It was mostly water, and I lost almost all of it within the first two months. I was trying to get back to work as well as care for my newborn. This shock to my system sent me into postnatal depression. As a result, I had to take off weeks of work, and found it difficult to bond with my newborn.” – Susan, mother of one
Many of the women I spoke with seemed ashamed of the blues. They had an urge to dismiss the effect of this natural phenomenon. An enormous drop in estrogen levels, combined with sleep deprivation, boredom, and stress have got to have some emotional effect, don’t they? Why do we feel ashamed?
It doesn’t help that unless you can say instantly, “I looove my baby. I am filled to the brim with giddiness. It was worth all the pain,” you are considered a beast. It is time to let go of the Stepford-mom ideal.
Ten Odd and Unusual Things About Newborns
that Might Give You the Skeevies
1) They don’t blink.
Don’t have a staring contest with one. You will lose. Your eyes will water, and you will become terrified that your baby’s eyes must be dry as a bone and will remain permanently stuck open. They also cry without tears for the first little while. They’re not faking it, they just don’t have working tear ducts yet. Rest assured, the first real tear that rolls down that sweet, chubby cheek will kill you.
2) They poop while they eat.
Somehow, this makes sense to them.
3) They have wobbly dead-turkey necks.
Their neck muscles haven’t developed yet, so all the tendons and ligaments are loose enough to allow them to flop their left ears over to their right shoulders. Skeevie!
4) They fling their arms out like little freaked-out bats.
The Moro or Startle Reflex is an adaptive hangover from Cro-Magnon times. If anything sudden happens, a breeze, a light, an errant thought, they are likely to throw their little arms out to the sides and jerk them like they were about to take flight and then thought better of it. I call it the “bat wing” reflex, but a more charitable fellow, Jeff, calls it “Jazz Hands.”
5) They curl their feet and hands if you tickle them.
This is also an adorable reflex because if you give a newborn your finger, they will hold it tightly in theirs. The skeevie element of this is that the fingers and toes clench because they are trying to hold on to the fur on their mamas’ backs. So, back in Neanderthal days, when you and I were women-who-ran-with-the-wolves, our babies could go for a ride. No slings, Bjorns, or Trekkers, just luscious back hair.
6) They bob their heads like little chickens pecking for food.
This “rooting reflex” helps you know when they are hungry. But you, most likely, are not a bag of grain.
7) They move like mechanical movie babies.
You know those really fake-looking robot babies that they use in films to represent newborns? The ones with the arrhythmic jerky motions? That is what babies actually look like in the first few days. Even yours, who is so cute and precocious and already smiling and saying “Doctoral Thesis.”
8) They come out with long, yellow, curling-over-the-edges fingernails.
And they’re sharp. Those talons will carve into you and themselves, so you must cut them. That first nail-cut was almost as traumatic as the first bath or the first inoculation. Some people bite their baby’s nails off, but I found that even more daunting. I already felt a bit like a cow, I couldn’t bear chewing on my baby as well.
9) They have a soft spot on the top of their skull.
They may also have jaundice, cradle cap, and baby acne on their heads and faces. All are normal and will pass. All are also a tiny bit skeevie.
10) They make loud, unearthly piggy noises.
A neighbour e-mailed me in shock soon after her baby came:
“Did Eli ever make extremely odd, loud demonic noises – particularly at night? Oliver makes these staccato, throat-clearing sounds that make him sound like he’s possessed. We’ve checked for horns and don’t see any, but those sounds are enough to drive one insane!” – Rochelle
THE FAMILY BED
We had wanted to have the baby in bed with us. Actually, Janis did. I was worried I would squish him in my sleep. After being assured by numerous friends and advocates of “the family bed,” we opted to try it for the unromantic reason that it seemed like the easiest thing to do. (Also, then I could more efficiently check every twenty seconds to make sure that he was still breathing.)
The first night that we got home from the hospital, we put him to sleep by my side of the bed in a beautiful rocking bassinet that Richard gave us. Then we got into our bed, intending to pull him in between us when he fell asleep. The pillows were all removed, the duvet was pulled down. There was nothing that could strangle or smother him. We were ready. Unfortunately, just as we got relaxed, Eli started his engines. Sara described our son’s newborn sleeping sounds as a cross between an elephant at full-mating trumpet and a car screeching around a corner in an underground parking garage. We couldn’t believe it. He was seven pounds! Where was this sound coming from?
“I know it’s supposed to be a blissful image – the mom and babe sleeping together, but it’s really hard to relax when you’re lying next to snorty snorty pig boy.” – Lori, mother of one
As most newborns do, he was waking every hour and a half to two and a half hours to nurse. In the little pocket of time that he actually slept, I couldn’t sleep because of how loud he was.
After three weeks, we couldn’t take it any more. I wasn’t getting any sleep at all. So Janis, ever the intrepid one, decided that he had to sleep in the crib in his own room. That meant we lost the convenience of just scooping him up and nursing him in bed. I also couldn’t peek and poke at him as easily. Instead, I had to get up, shuffle to the next room, pick him up, sit in a rocking chair and nurse him. And feel his chest to make sure he was breathing. And kiss his hands and feet and belly and little face. This often made it much harder to get back to sleep, but it was worth it.
Top Three Odd and Unusual Things About Newborns
that Will Give You the Joyful Weepies
1) The way their heads smell.
2) Their seriously unique personalities (that appear from moment one).
3) They make you live in the present for possibly the first time in your adult life.
BATH TIME
You may well wonder, How dirty can a newborn get? All she does all day is nurse, stare, and burble. Yes, she spits up all over herself. And, true, trying to get diarrhea off of a baby boy’s scrotum is like trying to get butter off of an English muffin.
For sure you don’t have to wash his hair. He’s not putting product in it. Okay, maybe there’s still bits of meconium there from the birth, but that’s natural, right? I bet people pay money to coat their babies in that stuff. I support you, sister, in your desire to let nature’s healing oils remove crap from your baby’s hair; and let the wonder of cellular recycling slowly slough dead skin cells off of your grungy little angel over a period of, say, months.
If you do decide to take the plunge, you’ll probably start with one of those cute shallow plastic tubs. Some have cup holders, for your coffee maybe.
Now, the big question: How hot should the water be? I remember asking Sara and she shrugged and said, “Warm, but not what you’d find hot. Probably warmer than you’d think.”
How does that help me? I want numbers, I want specific dial settings. We settled on a temperature that was slightly warmer than the neutral feeling you get when you drip warm water on the inside of your wrist.
I was very nervous the first time. One slip and he could breathe in water and get pleurisy or pneumonia and be in an iron lung! Can’t babies drown in an inch of water? Even if he has two moms with four hands gripping him? These arguments failed to convince Janis to leave him dirty until he was old enough to sing in the shower. Our midwife assured us that babies don’t need to be scrubbed with soap in the first little while. Just a dunk in some water with a little shpritz of baby wash in it was enough.
So, we got everything ready. We undressed him. Brought him naked to the tub. We paused and just looked at him. I hadn’t sat and simply looked at my naked child yet. I held him and breathed the scent of him. He gazed up at me (my hairline), then at Janis (her eyebrows). Then he peed on us.
Slowly, slowly, holding his soft, pointy head, we submerged him bit by bit in the water. First legs, then his back, then his arms – being very careful not to let the umbilical stump get wet.
Oh, the caution one takes with the umbilical stump. It’s like it’s the Hope Diamond instead of a black and yellow putrefying flap of dead skin. We read many different books, with passionately argued philosophies about the stump, to clean or not to clean, using alcohol or none. Some argued that the alcohol was of course necessary to disinfect and speed the drying – dear God, would you let a child’s open wound just turn to a pustule?! Other books said that the alcohol would damage the baby’s skin and was another example of the medical system’s desire to pathologize and control motherhood.
In the end, we went with our midwife’s suggestion – just leave it, it’ll dry out and drop off on its own – because it was lower maintenance. My sister cleaned her baby’s umbilical stump with alcohol every day using a Q-tip. Both my sister’s and my son’s stumps dropped off at the appropriate time with no fuss. Janis and I barely noticed it, just found it one day on the floor. A blackened nub of skin. Delightful! We celebrated. We wanted to make a party for it. I ended up keeping it wrapped in a drawer for months. One day I found it and freaked out because I thought it was a bug.
Back to the bath. All went well with Eli’s first dunk. He kicked a bit. He peed again. We decided not to wash his hair. We took him out and he was fine.
It was not long until I had another test of my comfort zone. Janis decided that she wanted to take him into our big tub with her. I looked at her like she had just suggested we let Eli back the car out of the driveway. She thought it would be a beautiful, bonding experience. My mind raced to all the things that could go wrong, including possible hygiene issues. “Just how clean are you?” I squinted at Janis.
After I gave her the Silkwood scrub-down and scoured our tub with natural antibacterial cleansers, we filled the bath with warmish water. Janis got in. I held the baby. I got peed on (by the baby). I gently handed him to her. She cradled him in both her hands and let him lie on his back on her chest. His limbs relaxed. He looked at the dark blue geometric tiles on the white walls. He was fascinated. He kicked his legs happily. There was no mistaking it. He loved it.
BREASTFEEDING
If you’ve read anything about breastfeeding you will have gleaned that it is not natural. It’s a sensually lovely and biologically miraculous thing, but it ain’t like learning to wink. This is also the time of the largest hormone influx in your entire pregnancy and childbirth. So, besides the stress of trying to keep something that can’t talk to you alive, you might be chemically psycho.
At first you need all your powers of concentration, a darkened room, and a team of lactation consultants, nurses, midwives, and partners standing by. It’s hard to imagine that in a few months you’ll be talking on the phone, typing, eating, and reading a magazine with him on one boob.
For the first few days, I needed help holding his wobbly head, while I gripped my breast and rubbed my nipple over his lips again and again, waiting for him to open up like a baby bird. When he did, we’d jam him on. You have to try to get their lips to be open and pressed up on your breasts, as opposed to sucked into their own mouths. If you can do all that right away, you are freakishly gifted. You should give the rest of us your number. So we can crank-call you.
In the first few days, all the baby is getting is the yellow, slimy, immune-boosting colostrum. By day three or four, you will start to produce breast milk.
When your milk “comes in,” you might become what is accurately called “engorged.” Your breasts will pop out like animated porn. You thought they were big before – just wait. They might become hot, hard, lumpy, and very sore due to the sudden influx of milk in your milk ducts. You may be lucky and not become engorged at all because you have a body that times things out perfectly. Don’t spread this around if you want to remain popular.
The midwives recommend an ancient method of dealing with the swollen, heat-seeking mammaries. Put cold cabbage leaves in your bra. They will slowly suck the heat from your breasts and cool everything down. Although when I first heard this suggestion I rolled my eyes at Sara, “You are such an earth-mama. Why don’t I just dip my breasts in mud and chant to the moon?” The second I became engorged I found myself moulding two large cold cabbage leaves inside my leopard-patterned nursing bra. It worked! Even though I looked like a vegetarian’s nightmare and smelled like borscht.
From a woman who never wore a bra, sometimes not even to workout, I suddenly had to wear one to bed. Otherwise, I risked knocking myself unconscious as I shifted in my sleep, or drowning us all in life-giving, buttery, leaking mama-milk.
Visitor Fatigue
One day in the first week, I was sitting on an uncomfortable, posture-perfect hard-backed chair, Eli’s head in my right hand, as I held his body like a football and tried to get him to open his kitten maw wider so he could get a mouthful of my right breast. He was crying and not sucking, and I was fretting.
My nipples were already raw from the times that he latched onto them only, and not the actual breast tissue. My milk had just come in and my breasts were very hot and uncomfortable. I was wearing a robe that wouldn’t close properly over my belly. (Janis and I were in PJs and robes for the first month or so – alternating with each other for a change of fashion.) My hair had yet to be washed since the big delivery day, and I could feel blood leaking over the sides of my mega-pad.
Although I thought my son was latched on, I was uncertain if he was sucking. I couldn’t hear the little clicking sounds that indicate swallowing that Sara had suggested we listen for. David was kneeling by my breast, singing to Eli in Yiddish. My sister was on the other side of me, watching intently, and occasionally making a suggestion directly out of a “breastfeeding is natural” pamphlet that she was holding. Some friend of mine, a Monday Morning Quarterback (whose face I have conveniently erased from my memory), was kneeling below me, tickling the baby’s jaw, ears, and feet in an attempt to force a sucking reflex.
In my mind’s eye, there were about a dozen other people there too, their own mouths latching and relatching like fish as they watched me try desperately to make a good connection with my newborn. They were shouting out comments, “Take some of his clothes off. Stick your finger in his mouth first. I don’t think he’s sucking.…” Through a haze, I looked at my bed and to my horror, sitting there, in matching pant suits, was a whole panel of older women judges holding up scorecards. I think the Russian judge gave me a two-point-four for technique and a minus six for style.
Finally I managed to get the baby to suck. Janis came in and saw the tinge of madness in my eye and shooed the phantoms and family away. Eli ate, farted, and went to sleep. I collapsed on our bed in a fetal position and wept, “I need to be alone when I nurse! I don’t know what I’m doing!”
I didn’t have to say any more, Janis became a bulldog there and then. Everyone had to leave while I nursed. No exceptions. Even if I wanted company. She began to implement a half-hour rule, which ended up being an hour rule, and to demand that whoever visits also cleans our bathroom. I thought that was pushing it – but it worked.
Complications
In the first week, quite a number of women I spoke with had dangerous complications with breastfeeding. Some babies latched but didn’t suck, or couldn’t latch properly at all. Although he seemed to be eating, Netty’s son, Parker, kept inexplicably losing weight. It was terribly alarming. Her doctor advised her to use formula. The midwives advised her to keep at it. Lactation consultants advised supplementing with a tube of breast milk. Netty felt like a victim in a turf war. She was exhausted, terrified for her child’s life, and needed clear direction about what to do. After feeding Parker with a spoon for the first few weeks, he figured it out and now nurses and eats voraciously.
Jenny and Victoria had a litany of similar struggles: cracked and bleeding nipples, mastitis (a painful fever-causing infection of the milk ducts), baby refusing to latch and becoming dehydrated. They both eventually turned to bottle-feeding and their sons are healthy and thriving. Plus, the moms had the bonus of not being tied to their child twenty-four hours a day.
Ultimately, how you get food in your baby matters little, so long as they get nourishment.
I was lucky. I had a blocked duct that needed to be treated with warm compresses and pressure, but Eli fed like a champ. He lost a few ounces in the first day, and then gained a pound a week for the next six weeks. A Midwife Collective record.
My friends and I had many resources to help us figure this breastfeeding conundrum out. In my mother’s day, there were no such luxuries.
“I was given the feeding ritual by the hospital nurses and Dr. Spock. The baby was to be fed every four hours, and be ‘taken off the breast’ after ten minutes and burped. To stretch out the time between feedings he was to be given water and walked, until the time was right for the next feeding. If he was asleep, he was to be woken up and fed. We couldn’t nurse on demand and rooming-in was still a dream. But there were times when the baby needed to nurse more often, and water did not satisfy him, so he was crying and desperate. And sometimes he needed to nurse longer, falling asleep on the breast. When I broke the rules it was a guilty thing. But I did it anyway.” – Lily
One final word about breast milk: it’s tasty! Before your flow becomes regulated, it can spray all over you and your baby in an excess of production. You might accidentally get a shpritz of the sweet, creamy stuff on your arm. Take a lick. I know you want to.
SLEEP
The other huge challenge with the newborn is sleep. You will soon understand why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. After the first few days you will be willing to sign any confession handed to you in any language.
Night means nothing to a newborn. Prenatally, babies sleep in small doses all day and night suspended in your dark, warm womb. Once they’re out in the world, they need time to understand that at night, when they wake up to feed, they should be civilized and go right back to sleep. Instead, sometimes they stay up for hours: crying, staring, burping, and needing your help to return them to dreamland.
Friends advised us to think of our sleep time in a twenty-four-hour clock. Go to bed at 8 p.m. and don’t attempt to get out until after 11 a.m. Sleep when the baby sleeps, if you can. Doze off when you can’t. Then you might get an interrupted eight hours.
“In the beginning, I’d cope by dropping off to sleep anywhere by 8:30 p.m. One night, I was woken up from a deep sleep by a phone ringing. ‘Who would dare?! It’s the middle of the night!’ I said. I nudged my husband out of bed to pick up the phone. It was my grandmother. It was 9:30 p.m.” – Lara, mother of one
Life as you know it, Party Gal, is over for a bit. Don’t worry, you won’t miss it. Your baby is doing all the late-night carousing for you.
Often in the first week, Eli would wake up in the night, nurse, and look around for where the action was. We had to discover what lulled him back to sleep. Janis was walking him back and forth in the hallway one night when she decided to go downstairs to get something. By the time she got back upstairs, he was asleep. Aha! Stairs! So in the night we’d trade off. Janis would do the stairs five times. If Eli wasn’t asleep, I’d do another one or two sets, then she’d keep going. Our record was twelve.
Sometimes you just need someone else to take over. One night, at 4 a.m., Janis came into our son’s room to find me holding him as he sobbed inconsolably. I was bouncing up and down with a wild look in my eyes and plaintively asking Eli and the universe, “What?! What?! What?! What?! What?!”
Janis carefully pried the baby from my arms, and angled me back to the bedroom. I what-ed myself down the hallway, into bed, and back to sleep.
My sister had an automatic swing. It saved her sanity. She’d pop a crying Jordan in it and, within minutes, he’d be back to sleep. She could leave him there for an hour. Diana, mother to James, lovingly referred to their swing as the “neglect-o-matic.”
Necessity is the mother-bear of invention and you will discover your own sleep-inducing tricks. A sampling of tips for when the boob isn’t enough include: rocking, bouncing, singing, a noise-machine that makes different womblike shushing sounds, pacifier, running a vacuum cleaner, laying them on a working dishwasher or washing machine, degassing them, calming music (Janis chose something randomly in the first week that we ended up getting stuck with to this day. It’s Enya. And it works), putting them in a sling and walking around with them, endlessly, taking them for a drive in the car (good luck transferring them from the car to the house, though), gripe water (a British remedy for colic and other digestive upsets. Aara, from the midwife prenatal group, swore by it. Especially the kind that has a little alcohol in it. When she was once offered one without any alcohol, she said, Are you, crazy? We need that drop of booze in there!”).
NUMBER TWO
Janis and I were advised that since by necessity I had to do all the night feedings, Janis should be responsible for any midnight poo-ey diaper changes. This idea ended up working well for Janis since Eli didn’t poo but once a week for months.
We were initially alarmed by this anal retention. (Not to mention the fact that breastfed baby poop smelled swampy sweet, like microwave popcorn.) The books told us that we had to make sure that he peed once on the first day, twice on the second day, and so on, to make sure he was not dehydrating. We assumed the same for poops. When he didn’t poop in twenty-four hours, we paged the midwife. She was in the middle of a birth. She left the labouring mother to answer our call.
“Hi, Joyce, I don’t know if this is a ‘pageable moment’ or not, but Eli has not pooped in twenty-four hours!”
“He doesn’t have to. If he doesn’t poop for five days, then we’ll talk.” Joyce was reassuring but wanted to get off the phone.
“And then what?” I pushed on, suddenly unconcerned about the needs of a labouring mother who was not me.
“Then we’ll wait another five days.”
“But hang on, hang on, why isn’t he pooping? Where is the milk going?”
“He’s digesting it.”
With that, she got back to the delivery room. Breast milk is so efficiently pure and usable to the new body that there may be little or no waste.
Your child’s poo: the size, colour, frequency, and decibel level can be preoccupying and, occasionally, appalling. Thank God Ruth was with me a few days later when Eli had his first gigantic poop. I was nursing him and he made a sound like “ffrrraaaapffffpowpow!”
“Good boy,” Ruth said calmly.
She responded to my bug-eyed look of revulsion by explaining, “They like to poo while they nurse. They’re relaxed.” I started to get up to change him and Ruth raised one skinny string-bean arm and said sagely, “Wait. They come in threes.” Sure enough. Two more explosions. She sang to him while I basically dipped him in a tub of water from armpits to feet.
All new parents will become poo-obsessed to a certain degree. Steve kept a log of his baby’s poos and shared status reports with anyone who would listen, or who couldn’t run away.
SAYING NO
I would rather deal with explosive diarrhea than negotiate boundaries with my family.
During the first week, there was a bit of a revolving door of welcoming friends and mishpoches. Like Jewish visitors everywhere, often people did not know when to leave. And we didn’t have the guts to tell them.
It all came to a head when Eli was five days old. David was the recipient. He had come by every day and was always sweet and helpful. He always brought Gatorade and great snacks. On this day, he wanted to bring some friends by to meet the baby. We felt too depleted to be around people whom we’d never met. We wanted to be alone, and we finally said so. Bluntly. He was hurt. These friends were like family to him, and they hadn’t met the baby yet. I told him that they could come to the bris (circumcision ceremony) three days from then. But three days was almost half of our baby’s lifetime at that point.
To many people it is difficult to explain just how huge a drain on your tiny supply of human life force it is for them to come by and “hang out” for an unspecified length of time. So let me be clear to all prospective visitors: If someone you love has a new baby, do not hang out! Come, tell the parents how gorgeous their pointy-headed, wrinkly babe is – even though she might look like Mel Brooks – clean up, and get out. Those are better gifts than a cotton hat from Baby gap. I hope someone will do that for you, and if they don’t, show them this book.
SAYING NO … TO MOM
We had planned for my mother to stay with us for the first week. At one point on the third day, Janis went out to do an errand. Eli and I were konked out. An insistent tapping woke me. I crept downstairs to see my sixty-three-year-old mother, standing on her tiptoes on a chair, scrubbing the light fixture in the living room like a whirlwind. Rest assured that that particular chandelier had not seen Windex in at least five years.
“My mother scoured every wall in our house. She vacuumed under the carpet. She said she was trying to make the air cleaner for the baby. We asked if she could come by once a week.” – Netty
Besides delousing our dusty lights, during the days Lily would cook, clean, calm, and cajole with breathtaking kindness and ease. However, after a few nights, Janis and I realized that we didn’t really need anyone with us overnight. When our son woke up he required me to nurse him, with Janis’s help and cheerleading. Or he needed us to figure out how to get him back to sleep. These were assignments that we had to do ourselves, since they would be our job for the next year or so. So we told my mom that we really didn’t need her to sleep on the lumpy futon in our living room any more.
This news, instead of being greeted with relief, was met with great sadness. My mother was dismayed that we didn’t need her at night, that there was nothing “momlike” she could do for us. I tried to explain that she’d raised a self-sufficient daughter who was fine on her own. But she was inconsolable.
I felt horrible that I’d made my mother cry, when she was just trying to do something nice for us. So I was inconsolable. Poor Janis had a boatload of consoling to do. Other friends were envious of our situation. They had little or no support and we had so much. How could we be ungrateful? Yet, I knew we were right. Bonding as a threesome was the most important thing we could do. That and figuring out where our son’s off switch was. (Eventually we realized there isn’t one. You have to take out the batteries.)
Diapers: Cloth or disposable? There are pros and cons for each. Cloth is natural, non-irritating, better for the environment. On the con side: They need to be changed more often and require you to somehow scrape off the poop, and then launder them, or to pay for a laundry service.
Disposables are easy, last longer between changings, and keep your baby more dry. However, they can be expensive, can contribute to landfill, and who knows what they’re made of. In Toronto, there is a company called Small Planet that recycles disposable diapers and also offers all-cotton disposables, if you’re environmentally conscious. That’s the middle ground we went for. Most importantly, remember that for disposables, the front of the diaper usually has a picture on it, the back has sticky tabs.