‘I’ll just give myself a little break over Christmas,’ I said. ‘I’ll get right back into the swing of things straight away,’ I said. ‘Relaxing is a good thing,’ I said.
I guess there’s nothing for it but to head to the hills and live off the land.
Although actually the cat has been very well behaved about the tree this year. It is the toddler pulling all the ornaments down so she can play with them.
Nothing can prepare you for waking up in the soft, glowy morning after having your first child—that one in the little plastic-walled bassinet next to your bed, wrapped up like an angelic bug in a hospital baby blanket—to the brick-wall reality that you are definitely already doing everything wrong.
On demand feeding means you feed the baby whenever they want it. You are supposed to learn their cues—open mouth, moving arms, turning head—so you know they’re hungry before they actually start crying. Apparently, I was useless at it.
This is the early stages of motherhood. Is the baby okay? Why’d they do that? Are you bad at everything? All the advice seems contradictory and confusing, but maybe it isn’t and comprehending basic instructions is beyond you because you’re too physically and emotionally messed up from staying up all night in agony, pain meds, having your genitals cut open and stitched back together, losing 1.3L of blood, being pooed on by the small squidgy human you went through all this for, coming down off pregnancy hormones and going back up on breastfeeding hormones? Did you just pee your disposable blood-soaked undies a little bit?
Who knows. Certainly not me. But the stakes are high.
The first few days of breastfeeding were awful. I couldn’t get the position right, my baby struggled to latch, when she did latch it hurt like her tongue was covered in needles, and she wouldn’t stay on very long.
All that was before my milk came in. To begin with, you only make something called colostrum. There isn’t much of it, and it’s just to keep the baby going until approximately day three when your body starts pumping out the real deal. The transition involves a tsunami of hormones that make you weepy and anxious, turn your breasts to a mass of engorged lumpy nightmare, and roast you like a big sweaty chicken.
For me, the first wave was pure anxiety.
Later, the depression hit. In a twist surprising no one, I was flagged early on as high risk for post partum depression (previous history of both anxiety and depression, previous pregnancy losses and pregnancy related trauma, life upheaval during pregnancy which I haven’t talked about here but essentially my little family was stuck with only my patreon income (lol) for five months but it turned out fine don’t stress, etc, etc).
It was the weirdest bout of depression I ever experienced, because I was happy too. My life was exactly what I wanted it to be, and I truly and honestly felt amazing about that and so lucky. I had no trouble bonding with my daughter, who was and is still the most wonderful, fascinating thing on the planet and probably off the planet too. But simultaneously I felt worthless and hopeless and I would just walk around dripping tears like a sopping dishcloth. It wasn’t a ‘I should be happy but I’m not so I feel guilty’. I legitimately was happy. Just also broken.
And breastfeeding affected me in the weirdest ways. You’re supposed to get a surge of oxytocin with it that makes you relaxed and happy, and I definitely got that later on when it all settled down, but for the first couple of months anytime I breastfed my insides would drop away and I would fall into this grey canyon of empty darkness.
This is all to say, hormones are weird, man.
And, disclaimer, I absolutely got help. Like I said, I’ve had mental health problems in the past and knew this was likely to be a rough time for me. I pre-emptively set myself up in therapy and the moment things started going wonky I went to my GP and we sorted out medication we knew from previous experience would help me. I already had a playlist of things to do when it all went to hell—start small, music, company, walks, TELL SOMEONE etc, etc—that I immediately activated.
The great thing about having had depression for most of my life is that I have had lots of practice implementing those things even when getting out of bed feels like too much effort.
Because I lost all that blood after giving birth, I had to stay in the hospital a few days, and in hospital we hadn’t been allowed many visitors thanks to the great panini, so the day we went home all the new grandparents came over. My parents very kindly and with amusement brough a large cabbage, which is supposed to help with breast discomfort somehow.
I remember going to the bedroom to feed the baby, and just being caps lock DONE. My partner came in, and I told him the baby had finished and could go out to see people again, but I would not be. I informed him that I would be lurking in bed with our big, chunky lunchbox icepack shoved down my sweaty, miserable cleavage and with cabbage leaves layered in my suddenly-too-small bra like the seashell cups of some sort of farty-bathwater mermaid.
He said fair enough, and he took the baby to distract the guests.
I lurked as described, and wept for no reason.
I couldn’t work out why I felt so awful, other than everything was awful. Bleeding, stitched, anaemic, exhausted, sore, lumpy, sweaty, leaky, shivery, and cabbaged.
The concept of an equal partnership in child-rearing is lovely in theory. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of it both in theory and in practice. It’s just that there are some areas that are impossible to split. E.g., pregnancy. If you don’t have the bits for it, you can’t help much there. And even if you do both have the bits for it, it’s not like you can switch partway through and do half each. Same with breastfeeding.
If you’re the partner, you do still have a job. You’re the Sam Gamee of this breastfeeding quest. The breastfeeder is Frodo. The baby is the one ring to rule them all. Your job description is that bit near the end where Frodo is caps lock DONE and Sam is all ‘I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you’ and then picks Frodo up and carries him and the ring together up the volcano.
Just stop the analogy before Gollum jumps out and starts biting off fingers and they chuck the baby in the lava.
You are in charge of bring heat packs and cold packs as required, keeping the feeder hydrated and fed, changing the baby, general garden maintenance … and hypothermia prevention.
Turns out some of why I was feeling so absolutely dreadful and shivery was that I had managed to ridiculous myself halfway to dying of exposure while in bed wrapped in a doona.
I’m updating my Patreon tiers! Now if you join at the Triceratops tier or higher you will get a sticker pack in the mail. They are very cool. It would be awesome if any patrons out there who haven’t already could pop on over to Patreon and update their shipping details so I can mail them out!
I completely expected for them to like power points, grabbing the cat’s tail and throwing themselves from heights. I knew about those things. Following a crawling baby around stopping her from repeatedly headbutting every solid object she came across was not something I expected to be doing at all, let alone often.
Big thank you to the friend who put me onto whisks as the best impromptu baby entertainment object.
It’s okay everyone, I’m in therapy, therefore this can be read as socially-acceptable self-deprecating snippet of entertainment and not a poor attempt to muffle the scream for constant validation that bubbles up inside me in ever smaller intervals that I am slowly becoming aware will never, ever be sated.
Show this comic to someone who likes tea. Or chairs.
I’ve used my Lu Repeating pattern skills (reminder that I have a pattern persona called Lu Repeating) to make a new cat pattern of Silence Killed the Dinosaurs style cats. For fun.
You may have noticed that my website looks a little different (if you haven’t, please notice now). Well, I’ve been thinking for a while I should jazz it up, and I was sifting through WordPress themes to see what my options were and think about what I was going to do. I figured, with a chronic illness and a one-year-old in the picture, it would be best to plan meticulously, get everything I needed drawn, written and organised over a few weeks, and then pull it all together quickly and painlessly. Like a professional.
I’m sure you can guess the general direction this is going.
I ruined everything. I accidentally activated a new theme.
And I couldn’t just switch back to my old layout because a) I would have to re-do the aesthetics anyway just like I would on a new layout and b) I had CSSed the crap out of the old one so actually it would take much, much longer to re-do.
The only way out of the mess I had made was through.
I kissed goodbye to my beloved sidebar. I love the old-school blogger vibe, jam-packed with buttons and banners and links and titbits. But the look is dated, probably no one else likes them, and it only shows up on desktop which hardly anyone uses outside of work these days anyway.
We won’t linger on the new WordPress Site Editor [beta]. I do like the concept. It’s versatile. Makes all kinds of cool shit possible. But actually using it is kind of like trying to format anything in Word.
I stayed up past midnight several nights running. I built headers and footers. I re-jigged menus. I vectored logos. I tripled checked everything would not size weird or go to complete shit when viewed on tablets or mobile.
And then I got gastro.
I realised to make all the new site editor elements work the way I wanted to, I would have to go back into each individual post I had ever made—as in, back seven years ago to 2014—and change/add various meta-data elements I had been pretending didn’t exist because life is too hard to learn new things even if they make everything look much more professional.
And I don’t want to have a big, angsty moment here, but it’s really difficult to go look at old work. Like just … really difficult. I avoid it. I avoid it so much it’s the main reason I put off updating my site for so long in the first place.
After a while I became completely desensitised to it, which I guess means it functioned as DIY exposure therapy and maybe I’m emotionally stronger and a better creator having done it or something I don’t know FEELINGS I don’t like feelings especially ones about myself they bother me into the worst flustery run on sentences it’s much more comfortable to draw myself being horribly obliterated.
Back to nice, comfortable catastrophe. There was still heaps to get through and without the emotional distress melting my face off, it was just boring.
In short, the last couple of weeks have been A LOT.
But I did it.
Ta da.
Click around. Make yourself at home.
I know what you’re thinking. Fuck yes that header-logo-banner-whateveritis image is awesome, and you bet your gastro arse you can get it on a mug.