YO MAMA: The newborn phase can go to hell

OPINION

I’ve been peed and pooped on, there are milk stains on the couch and I can’t remember if I put on deodorant today—smells like not.

Among my recent late night Google searches: Does your body odour get stronger after having a baby? Actually, it does — and it’s to help your baby find you. Just another of life’s gross-yet-wonderful little miracles. Kinda gross. Kinda cool.

It’s Week One with our newborn, who we nicknamed Bug, and life feels like one big science project. There are things that spew in volcanic proportions and things that triple in size overnight as if injected with growth serum. Bug’s umbilical cord stump looks like something that should be preserved in formaldehyde and displayed at a museum. The delirium is how I imagine subjects in a psychedelic drug study might feel. There is no longer a division between night and day; there is only awake and asleep, and crazy lucid postpartum dreams. I find a pile of antibiotics on the counter and have no idea if they are the morning pills that I forgot to take, or my past self having the foresight to lay out the evening ones. There is a crusty dab of dried toothpaste on my toothbrush from a time — I have no recollection of when — that I attempted to clean my teeth. The toothbrush sits there, collecting dog hair. The face that looks back at me from the mirror is unrecognizable. Did I even have a baby, or is this all a hallucination?

But, of course, the baby is all too real. He makes darn sure that you don’t forget about his existence for a single second of a single day.

We meticulously record pees and poos on a tally sheet. I’m somewhat disappointed when our midwife only glances at it; I guess I was expecting a gold star for our Bug’s record-setting number of poos.

The only difference I can find between parenthood and an actual science project is that what’s at stake isn’t an A+ or nerdy bragging rights, it’s THE LIFE OF OUR SON. I’m convinced that at any given moment I am going to kill our perfect little human specimen by spontaneously dropping him (which is a legitimate concern because I seem to drop just about everything else these days), failing to support his floppy neck, or allowing him to suffocate. On the way home from the hospital, we hit a bump on our driveway and I thought “Great, there goes his neck. It’s all over now, he’ll probably never walk again.” When he falls asleep in my arms I listen tensely for the sound of his breathing. My sole purpose is his survival.

I knew becoming a parent was going to be a huge responsibility, but the enormity of it didn’t hit me until I held Bug in my arms. I used to be a person who was not afraid of many things. But now there’s something I’m afraid of more than anything: the possibility of losing Bug. It’s such a big thing, how much I love him already, and those feelings are all mixed up with the fear and anxiety that something could happen to him.

The thing is, I would be nervous taking care of a baby at my best, most well-balanced self. I don’t know who that person is anymore. I am so unbelievably tired. I actually think back to my 36-hour labour with fond memories; at least I could lie in bed without the sound of a wailing infant.

My husband keeps reassuring me with the soothing logic that “teen moms have babies all the time and manage to keep them alive.” He adds that I should stop worrying about the baby freezing to death from a lack of layers because moms and babies do just fine in the frozen wasteland of Siberia.

All I do is try to sleep, and yet I am exhausted all the time. But then there is Bug. He doesn’t do much, but then again, neither do I. We mostly sit and stare at each other. I lie on the couch with my knees bent and lean Bug up against them like an open book. His fingernails are the size of tiny broken eggshells. His nose is like a round pebble you’d pick up and keep in your pocket because it’s so beautiful and smooth. He does funny little movements with his arms, kind of like a belly dancer, all flowy and slow. He doesn’t seem to realize his arms are a part of him. He is an absolutely marvelous little creature and makes all of this worth it.

I keep thinking that something is going to go wrong. I worry that my milk won’t be good enough. That he’ll suddenly stop breathing. That those weird eye movements mean he has brain damage. I have to trust in this blind faith that my body and his will do exactly what they are supposed to. That the hidden mechanisms and bodily processes inside us will activate on queue, no rehearsal, flawlessly for the first time.

We’ve made it this far, which at times seems like a true miracle. And then my husband reminds me, “Hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day to parents just like us. If they can do it, so can we.”

— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.