Moms matter, right?

Moms matter, too.

I know that probably seems obvious but to me, in the throes of postpartum, it wasn’t. Sure, people were concerned with how I was doing, but they were mostly concerned with how the baby was doing. I was one of those people.

In the first two weeks after leaving the hospital, my baby’s weight plateaued at his discharge weight. This can be bad for your baby, but it’s actually bad for your whole household. I say this because a hungry baby won’t sleep, and will cry. A lot.

At one point, I had been up with the baby overnight, and he had breastfed about every single hour or less. I recall my husband coming downstairs in the morning, after trying to catch a few hours of sleep himself, and asking me “How many times have you fed him today?”

The hospital had given us a little card to track feeds, wet diapers, and dirty diapers on. I had 8 checkmarks in the feeds column for the day so far. I needed to sleep but the baby kept crying. My husband tried to take him for a while so I could sleep, but I couldn’t sleep with my baby crying. I finally put him in the stroller and took him outside, just to see if a change of scenery would help.

While I was outside, a neighbour walked by with her dog. I’m sure I looked completely unhinged. I hadn’t slept at all in what felt like a week (and that was for the most part true), and I couldn’t tie my shoes because of the swelling that happened in my legs and feet after my c-section. I’m pretty sure I cried while I was talking to her, which happened to me a lot in conversations in the first six-ish weeks postpartum.

We went to the doctor that day for the baby’s first appointment after leaving the hospital. This was 3 days later. He hadn’t gained any weight, and I asked about cluster feeding and if it was normal for it to go on for like 14 hours, and they said yeah, sometimes babies do that. I had been under the impression that there was also an appointment booked for me (as it said in the online portal), but there wasn’t. I had to ask at the end of the appointment if I could ask questions about myself.

It wasn’t for another 3 days when we went back to the lactation clinic that we realized the baby wasn’t gaining any weight at all, which resulted in an intervention known as triple feeding (aka Hell). For the uninitiated, this is when you breastfeed the baby, give them a top-up bottle, and pump (in my case, for 20 minutes) after each feed. I was also instructed to feed him every 3 hours from start of feed to start of feed, even overnight.

I truly think that this is where postpartum depression started to creep in for me. I was so caught up in ”is the baby eating enough?” that I did’t even stop to wonder if I was eating enough.

Side note: If your postpartum wife asks you for a snack, don’t bring her just one cookie. Bring her a proper fucking snack so she doesn’t bite your head off. Because she’s hungry AF and your head will be an excellent snack.

I often find myself wondering why I felt like such an afterthought, even inside my own brain, after gestating a human baby, having a long (exhausting) labour, and a surprise c-section. After any other major abdominal surgery, you would rest, take it easy, and focus on healing. Yet there I was, setting an alarm for every 3 hours and recording the baby’s feeds and diapers each day, while barely remembering to take my own pain medications.

Where does this superhuman expectation come from?