Things that suck about being post-partum

June is no longer an infant and it rules. I'm sure I'm going to look back on her infancy and get all teary-eyed and yearn for those days of yore. That's why I made this list:

Things that suck about being post-partum: 

My body proportions are completely out of whack.
Breastfeeding makes your boobs look huge (or maybe they just make my boobs look huge, I have no clue). For this reason, my enormous rack creates the illusion that I have a really tiny head. Whenever I look at myself in the mirror I see:

Yeah, GET REAL, Barbie! Unless you're Post-Partum Barbie or something. Then you're a little too real.

And not only do you have a huge rack and a shrunken head, you still have a big floppy pregnancy gut hanging off your midsection and a shitload of extra skin. Oh, and your feet grew a full size during pregnancy. So have fun looking like Pale Man.

"Aren't you glad you have your body back?" UM, NO. 

I don't have an excuse to get fat anymore.

I gained 35 pounds when I was pregnant, and the last 10 pounds I gained is what I like to call "Taco Weight." When I was pregnant, we didn't eat out very much at all. But every once in a while we would drive to our parents' houses in the Chicago suburbs for a visit, and with traffic the ride would take usually two hours or so -- which was an hour longer than my tolerance for not eating, so I'd insist we swing by Taco Bell for a "snack." Sure, it wasn't really healthy, but it's not like I wouldn't gain weight anyway, right? If I gained five pounds because of umbilical fluid, or five pounds because of two Chalupas, who would ever know the difference?

I had the baby five months ago, and now the difference is painfully clear. The weight you gain from growing a placenta and developing umbilical fluid -- that goes away. The weight you gain from eating Chalupas? That sticks around. On your ass. Probably forever, since I don't exercise. So now I'm fat and the worst part is that I can't even blame the baby. I'm fat because I eat Taco Bell, not because I'm pregnant. Baby's out. Taco Weight is still hanging around. The jig is up.

Also, Taco Bell meat looks like June's poop. So it's not even as enjoyable as it once was (lie).

Picture this inside a diaper. 

You get a monster period.
I don't want to get all graphic on this blog, and normally I wouldn't talk about my bodily functions and fluids because that's fucking disgusting, but I have to bust a myth here. When you give birth, you don't just push out the placenta and that's it. You bleed. For WEEKS. And it's not just some "spotting" like everyone is going to tell you beforehand -- you get a SIX-WEEK-LONG MONSTER PERIOD.

 What I didn't anticipate was having to wear ADULT DIAPERS until J was two weeks old, and then bleeding steadily for a month after that. Like, damn, enough already.

Like this. For six weeks. 

Some people I know only bled for a week or two. And by "people I know" I mean random bitches on WebMD.

You cry -- a lot.
Crying is probably my least favorite thing to do besides passing kidney stones. I've found that motherhood messes with your hormones in a major way, but at no time is it more intense than in the first two weeks of your baby's life. By some miracle I did not have postpartum depression, and yet I would start tearing up if my husband made fun of me for putting potato chips on my chicken salad sandwich. Everything makes you cry like a bitch. Baby smiles up at you? Cry like a bitch. Husband falls asleep while you stay up and nurse? Cry like a bitch. Milk stains all over your adult diapers? Cry like a bitch.

And God forbid you're ever exposed to something in the postpartum period that reminds you of your baby. On a trip to Target when June was still an infant, I made the colossal mistake of wandering through the book aisle. I saw a book that my mom used to read to me when I was little and I made the EVEN MORE COLOSSAL MISTAKE of opening it up and skimming through.

More like CRY LIKE A BITCH FOREVER

I literally panicked and ran home so I could watch my baby sleep before she GREW UP AND LEFT MOMMY FOREVER. This book is the saddest shit in the world and I have no idea why parents want to read this to their children -- as though the thought of them growing up and leaving home and never coming back to visit is something you want to drill into their subconscious every single night. Plus how can you even read this to your kids without sobbing uncontrollably? Because I sure can't. The baby grows up and becomes a man! He rocks his mother when she's super old! And then he sings the song to his own baby daughter! I CANT EVEN. 

"As long as I'm living my baby you'll WAHHHHHH..."

If I could even read this book long enough to deconstruct the thing, I would be really weirded out by the whole thing. This mom raises her son like a single parent -- the dad is never mentioned anywhere in the book -- and the son is pretty much a thankless turd throughout. He trashes her house and is loud and obnoxious and shit. Doesn't stop her from crawling in his bedroom when he's fifteen and rocking him like an infant. And this continues well into adulthood. She drives over to his house and climbs in his bedroom window and rocks him to sleep, WHEN HE'S FORTY. No wonder he moves away and doesn't come back home to visit until she calls him up and is like hey, I'm gonna die soon. It's a weird, weird family dynamic. I still cried. 

You turn into a dairy cow.
I was lucky enough to successfully breastfeed June, and it's been incredibly gratifying to see her plump up, knowing that it was my body -- all mine! -- that nourished her to the pinnacle of health. That said, every time she latched on for the first three weeks I wanted to kill myself. Breastfeeding was an excruciating nightmare where I literally felt like my nips were on fire and I winced whenever she eyed my boobs. And the pain isn't the half of it.

This is what happens when you google "milk explosion." Trust -- this is not a milk explosion. You'll soon know what a real milk explosion is. 

Until your milk "regulates," you're going to be soaking wet every time you hear the baby cry. Or whenever you think about your baby. Or for no reason at all. I have no idea if this is something that happens with the first baby only, or if it lessens with every subsequent baby, but there came a time when I was so sore and leaking so much milk into my nursing bras that I literally just sat upstairs in the loft with no clothes on and watched Keeping up with the Kardashians and iced my boobs with bags of frozen vegetables. I don't even remember where the baby was.

So keep that in mind, future-self. When you get misty-eyed and baby-hungry, remember the boobs. Remember the nipple-fire and the lanolin cream and calling your lactation consultant like ten thousand times. Remember the NO SLEEP and the monster periods and wringing milk out of your yoga pants.

And then remember getting pregnant means having an excuse to eat tacos, and get pregnant anyway.





**No I'm not pregnant. 

I'm not pregnant! Everybody drink!

When I was pregnant, I couldn't wait to be un-pregnant. Never mind the fact that I'd finally have my baby (one I've wanted since I was practically a zygote myself), but I could do a ton of glorious things like eat whatever I wanted and drink margaritas and be able to see my feet again. One year ago today I was lying on the couch, dry-heaving, just wanting to get my body back. So I thought I'd celebrate by writing this post:

Things that are awesome about NOT being pregnant:

No more random gagging.
For the first three months of pregnancy that is all I did. At least morning "sickness" would have been understandable, because that's what pregnant women do. Right? They have some slight-but-tolerable nausea in the morning and then they get over it and go to their prenatal yoga classes or whatever normal pregnant women do. For me, it was more like this, all the time:




Not cute.

I pee less.
When I was 38 weeks pregnant, I literally peed every half-hour. My full-time job was just peeing. It was totally futile to even leave the bathroom at one point, because I'd just be back in there, peeing, ten minutes later. At one point, after an OB visit with my husband, I peed right after we left the doctor's office, waddled out into the parking lot, and announced, "Um, I have to pee again." For real. Now I can't even remember the last time I peed, like God intended. 

I can exercise like a normal human again.
I think I ran a total of once when I was pregnant. I had to go to the store for some groceries and I thought it would be uber-smart and not-stupid-at-all to jog my big ass to the store. You know, to get exercise. I started off like this: 

Yeah, I'm all healthy and shit!

And by the time I got to the grocery store, I looked like this:

I CANT BREATHE

I ended up sprawled on my back outside of the grocery store entrance for ten minutes because I got a massive cramp in my side and just could not go on. I spent the rest of the day recovering on my sofa. It's amazing I didn't die during childbirth.

And no, I haven't really exercised since giving birth, either (unless you count that one time I played Just Dance.) But my point is that I could probably jog a couple blocks now without feeling like I needed to call an ambulance. That's always a good feeling.

I have the ultimate-pain trump card.
I gave birth. That's right, fools. I pushed seven and a half pounds of baby out my va-jay-jay and that gives me license to WIN EVERY ARGUMENT AGAINST MY HUSBAND EVER. Oh you have a headache? Yeah that must hurt. Probably not as much as pushing a baby out your vag, but whatever. Aw, your back hurts? My back hurt for fourteen hours when I was pushing a baby out of my vag. Aw you have a papercut? Do you know what an episiotomy is? Mind blown, bitch. I win.

Anyone else's fingers hurt? 

For the record, I got an epidural. So I guess I don't have the ultimate trump card.

I can eat so much glorious sushi.

I probably have some kind of vitamin deficiency, because I have cravings for sushi every single day. And not healthy sushi, like the locally-grown, fresh, premium-cut kind you'd probably find in Japan. I like the mayonnaise-drenched, deep-fried, tempura-stuffed rolls that are slathered with fifty kinds of raw, fatty fish. American sushi. Things with "monster" and "godzilla" in the title. Stuff with FAT and MEAT and SAUCES. Raw fish aside, this probably would have poisoned my unborn baby based on the sodium and fat-content alone, so I abstained. It took all of my willpower, but I stayed away from sushi for nine hellish months. And then I made a sushi run THREE DAYS POSTPARTUM. I'm getting hungry just typing this.

(As a side note, I can't even comprehend people who order cucumber rolls. It's like a non-food. I literally don't even see it when I look on a sushi menu, that's how much of my time I would like to waste on cucumber rolls. Cucumber rolls remind me of that scene in the Phantom Tollbooth when everyone eats Subtraction Soup, and the more they eat the hungrier they get. I guess technically I could have eaten sushi during pregnancy if I ate cucumber rolls, but I also would have turned into the Hulk and smashed everything in sight out of hunger-rage.)

Blandy McYuckerson

But the primary reason I'm so glad I'm no longer pregnant?

Put that tongue back in your mouth, stinker! 

Because I get THIS little person. And these little people are so RIDICULOUSLY worth it.