Chief among the lessons I have learned is that no matter how much warning you've been given, there is nothing that truly prepares you for it.
I mean seriously. My understanding of what motherhood entails seems very clinical compared to what I've experienced in a piddly half week.
When most people talk about motherhood, they'll tell you about the irrational and unconditional love, but until I went 4 hours without holding either of them, I didn't realize that translated to a desperate need, & a total craving to feel them against my chest and look at their little faces. I imagine it will wear off to a degree, but I love peeking in on them as they sleep to fill that need.
I was also told about the exhaustion, but again, while I understood what it felt like to be exhausted, I didn't understand being awake at 4:30 AM, having not slept the entire night after averaging 2-4 hours of sleep all week (also after a major abdominal surgery), comfort nursing my son while my husband - who also hasn't slept more than 2-4 hours a night and has to get up for work and school in 2 hours - paces with our daughter, neither of us having any clue what's making our babies cry. I went through the list. Hungry? No, they just ate. Poopy? No, we just changed them. Too hot? Maybe, but taking off one of the blankets wrapped around them like a burrito didn't help a thing. Too cold? Impossible. Our bedroom is at least 5 degrees warmer than the hospital room. Sick, then? Possible. Neither of them were able to muster very effective burps after their last meal, & my girl has a rocket case of the hiccups. Maybe their tummies have too many bubbles.
As our daughter settled into a fitful sleep and our son began to fuss because my still-developing milk supply ran out, my husband looked at me with heavy bags under his eyes, and a slight smile quirked at the corner of his mouth, which then quickly fell back into the neutral expression that takes so many fewer muscles to pull off.
"This is what we signed up for," he whispered, stroking our little girl's head.
And I nodded, because it's exactly what we signed up for, & we knew very well that babies meant sleep deprivation, even if we had no clue what that actually felt like.
And even then, pacing around and burping my son while the incision in my stomach ached and begged me to just lay down, as I was coming to understand what "sleep deprivation" really felt like, that craving was still there. I needed Anders and Annalaé Rose so badly, and I needed to know what was bothering them so I could make it stop.
Then there are hormones and emotion that everyone warns you about. The emotion started on Day 2, when the lactation consultant came to help me breastfeed. I had very little milk/colostrum at all and had to supplement with formula while using otherwise pointless breastfeeding to stimulate production. It's a fairly normal scenario, & I knew it was irrational to feel like a failure, but between the breastfeeding class where they tell you not to give your child a pacifier for 3 weeks to avoid nipple confusion, & that breastfed babies are smarter than formula fed babies, I definitely felt like a second rate mom for not only using formula, but giving in to the pacifier in the very first night.
Yeah, for the record, my head knows better than that, & I'm a first rate mom for sacrificing my exclusive breastfeeding goal to insure my babies got the nutrition they needed.
Even though the intense emotion started 2 days ago, this morning there were more tears. Not for any reason. Just because I'm so tired, and my babies slept too long after we finally got them down and woke up hungry, and I just love them so much, and my mom made me French toast and rubbed my legs, and my pain pills wore off while I slept, and basically feelings.
They're napping now, and Annalaé Rose is squeaking in her sleep. I'm lying in bed, trying to nap while I process all these thoughts and emotions. There's so much to get done - I'm still recording the birth in my journal, and am only to the part where they whisked Annalaé Rose away without letting me see her, because she wasn't breathing. I wanted to do a birth announcement too, with a creative theme, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to just scratch that. "Hey, I had twins and here are some pics from my phone" on Facebook is really effective enough. It's survival mode now.
So, to sum things up, motherhood is wonderful, but there's nothing to really prepare you for it besides jumping in. And if any of my non-parent friends are wondering, the joy of motherhood doesn't look anything like this:
It looks much more like this:
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