All the Days After

When I posted our birth story and Ben read it, he asked, "What about all the days after?"

My reply was, "I'll get to it."

The truth was when he asked that just a few weeks after having Eleanor, I wasn't ready to write about all the days after quite yet.

It has taken me quite a while to process all of what I felt in all the days after.

I was inspired to get my feelings about postnatal down after reading this post. A lot of women get in their head that there is basically only two states of emotion after having a baby: total euphoria and elation and postpardum depression. I am here to speak from experience that I do not believe this to be true.

I was beyond happy and excited when we found out I was pregnant. We wanted a baby. I expected the time after we had the baby to be magical. Once we got to that point after an amazing birth, gushing over our beautiful baby girl I began to feel unlike myself at times. Please don't get me wrong here, I was still beyond excited to be a mother and feeling so blessed to have a healthy baby however, there were a million other emotions as well.

I have never been an overly emotional woman. I am generally pretty even-keeled. My husband makes a lot of comments regarding the fact that I am pretty easy to deal with as far as women go. {Gee, thanks, Hub} All of a sudden I was emotional wreck. I was crying at least once a day, feeling anxiety whenever people were around and always feeling anxious when anyone other than my husband or I was holding the baby. I never felt sad, depressed, like I wanted to hurt myself or the baby, I just constantly kept describing my feelings to Ben as overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed by anything it seemed. Breastfeeding was not proving to be as easy as I had anticipated, I was exhausted as are many first {second, third...} time moms, and it was like the reality of this little person was setting in.

I constantly felt guilty. Guilty if I was sleeping and Ben was not, guilty for crying all the time, guilty for overburdening him with all these stupid emotions. I also felt guilty because it appeared that all Ben felt was total elation {which he later admitted that he was just as overwhelmed but is obviously a guy so he felt he couldn't express emotions like me and wanted to be the strong one. Thank you, Hub, for being my rock}. I felt like I was ruining this special time for us. He started to worry that I was missing these first days with our baby because I couldn't pull it together. Then I started to feel so silly for feeling this way. What could be to cry about? I had a beautiful, healthy baby who was, for all intents and purpose, super easy.

When I went back for my 2 week postnatal visit and when she asked how things were going, I broke down crying. The midwife reassured me that all of these feelings were normal. I was dealing with something called hormones. Oh, you've heard of them? Me too. I had just never realized how much they would affect my daily life.

The more I talked about all my feelings the better I felt. However, for awhile I felt like such a weirdo. Women don't feel this way after having a baby. That is not true. It was interesting to because I had a lot of friends have babies last year and I could always tell the women that truly identified with what I was feeling as opposed to the women that didn't really experience any of these feelings and just kind of shrugged and agreed with feeling emotional.

Back to being pregnant, I wasn't really myself throughout pregnancy either. I wasn't overly emotional but I never really felt that good during pregnancy so I think that contributed a lot to my mood. That was another thing I felt guilt for is that I felt like my husband hadn't had the real me in over 9 months!

These days, I am feeling a lot more like myself. There are still days when I feel a little off or like I simply just don't want to get out of my jammies or like I am completely overwhelmed. However, I feel better about dealing with and knowing that there just will be days like that and it's okay. I was so proud when I went to my 4 and 6 week postnatal appointments and did not cry and could report that there had been says in a row that I hadn't cried! I know, right? What an accomplishment.

Like I talked about in my breastfeeding post, I think there are a lot of things about having newborns that women forget. Which is great because we may not have more kids if we remembered every little detail...totally kidding! But, it is nice to move on and continue to thrive in my new role.

Everyday I feel more confident with my baby, as a mom and as a wife/mom. I know there will continually be challenges and struggles as a parent but that is why it is such an adventure.