Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  “Hmm, okay,” the nurse said—not like she didn’t believe me, but also not exactly like she did. The Cervidil came in a pouch with a string attached that would be inserted in my vagina. As I suspected would happen, she had some trouble getting it in. “Try to get some rest,” she said, and the weird thing was that she was serious.

  In the meantime, Matt was trying to expand the small sofa so he could lie down, but the only way to extend it blocked the door to the bathroom. We decided we would leave the bathroom door slightly open—but that also meant that the door wouldn’t close, either. If you’re someone who gets off on the idea of peeing in the dark in an open-back gown while your husband snores three feet away from you, then this setup might have been exciting, but since that is not a specific fantasy of mine, it was just annoying.

  On the tour of the hospital, they’d taken us into one of the labor and delivery rooms and made a big deal about how there was a tub in the bathroom, so if you were someone who was into the idea of laboring in a tub, then you’d want this room. At the time, I thought, sure, laboring in a tub sounds kind of cool, in an I’m not enough of a hippie to give birth at home but I can get down with laboring in a tub kind of way. Now that I was actually at the hospital, but nowhere near going into labor, I had no desire to get anywhere near a tub. All I wanted to do was sleep, but that was impossible. And I couldn’t feel anything happening inside me. I lay down on the bed and tried not to move.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Matt went downstairs to get coffee. I’d barely slept, since every time I tried to get comfortable, the monitor slid off me and a nurse came in to readjust it. “The room across the hall is open,” Matt said. “It’s much nicer than this one. It has a huge window.”

  “Ask them if we can switch,” I said.

  “Ask who?” he said.

  “I don’t know. The person at the desk?”

  “I don’t want to bother them,” he said.

  “Oh come on,” I said. “This is the time to bother someone!”

  “Not gonna do it,” he said.

  So when my nurse came in a few minutes later, I asked, in my nicest I-know-this-is-totally-against-policy-but-I’m-going-to-ask-anyway voice, if we could move across the hall.

  “We usually don’t move people,” she said. She had a gruff demeanor. I must have looked really pathetic lying there, though, because then she said, “But I’ll ask.”

  We moved. I took a kind of grim satisfaction in feeling like I had negotiated a room upgrade at the Best Western. It turned out that was the only satisfaction that was going to be had right then. The new room may have been bigger and brighter, but my cervix didn’t seem to care. My doctor came by to see why things weren’t progressing and informed me that I had “a cervix like Fort Knox” and that it was the “most impenetrable cervix” she’d seen in fifteen years of practice; I had to be given fentanyl to be able to tolerate the cervical checks, and even then they were still incredibly painful; to get a Foley balloon in, which is supposed to force your cervix open with an actual balloon, I had to have an epidural. A full day had gone by, and I had dilated barely three centimeters. I was supposed to, at that point, be at ten. The next morning they put me on Pitocin, a drug that’s supposed to jump-start contractions, but nothing was jump-started, and eventually, forty hours into being at the hospital, my doctor informed me that they had done everything they could, but she was getting concerned about fever and my uterus overheating, which sounded unpleasant for everyone, and my contractions were barely perceptible on the monitor and still very far apart, and it didn’t seem like the baby wanted to come out on his own. I was going to have a C-section.

  From there everything happened very quickly. I was wheeled into the OR, and in the OR I started shaking uncontrollably, which they had not warned me was going to happen, and Matt was holding my hand and reassuring me that everything was going to be okay, and it felt like I was shaking on the operating table forever but it was really only about twenty minutes. I couldn’t feel anything, but my insides were outside of my body and then, through the sheet, they held the baby up, and I exclaimed, “It’s a baby!” Then I passed out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  He looked like a Henry, we decided that first night, alone with the baby in the hospital room. He was sleeping in a clear-sided bassinet, his thin cotton hospital cap on top of a shock of black hair. I was hooked up to an industrial-strength breast pump, trying to convince my boobs to produce something—anything—so I could feed him. Finally, I was able to get some drops of liquid, but it looked brownish. “It’s just a little blood—we call it a rusty pipe. It’s fine to feed that to him,” one of the nurses reassured me. Gross, I thought. When would I get “real” milk? I’d heard stories of women who were “overproducers,” meaning that their breasts made so much milk that their babies gagged because of how quickly it came out and they ended up with multiple freezer chests full of bags of breast milk, but I wanted to just be producing something.

  And I was still in a lot of pain, even though I was taking Percocet and Tylenol every few hours. In the morning, when they removed my catheter, I would have to go to the bathroom on my own. It turned out that just getting to the bathroom, which was only a few feet away, was a production, because it hurt to get out of bed, and it hurt to walk, and it hurt to sit down on the toilet and to get up. And then once I was finally on the toilet, I couldn’t pee. I could feel the pee in my bladder, I really had to go, and yet, it wasn’t coming out. I sat on the toilet, tears welling in my eyes. I couldn’t pee, I could barely produce milk, I couldn’t even sit up on my own.

  When I’d woken up in the recovery room after the C-section, a nurse had put Henry on my chest, and he had attempted to nurse, but he couldn’t get a good latch on my nipple. “Your nipples are flat—that’s why he’s having trouble,” she said. “We’ll have you use a nipple shield.” I had the vague notion that this was the vaunted “skin to skin” contact that everyone talked about as being so important in bonding with the baby, but I could barely keep my eyes open. Now, in the hospital room, the nurse showed me how to use the nipple shield so he’d be able to latch. It was a small piece of plastic that suctioned on to my areola and had a little fake nipple that went over my nipple, with a few holes poked in the top so the milk would come out. I had trouble with this, too: I couldn’t get the shield to stick on my nipple, and it seemed like even once my milk started flowing—albeit slowly—he wasn’t getting that much of it.

  I’d heard other moms talk about feeling so overcome with love when they first met their children, and instantly feeling bonded with them as though their new baby had immediately filled a hole in their lives. So I just assumed it was something that automatically happened to everyone. But I didn’t feel that, exactly. I knew I loved Henry, and I was amazed by him and the fact that he had just been lifted out of my body. And of course, I was enormously grateful for him. But more than anything else, I felt overwhelmed. Here was this tiny, completely helpless human who was now completely dependent on me, and I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of him. I couldn’t even nurse him properly.

  Was I supposed to have some kind of primal mother instinct that would click on? If I was, it hadn’t clicked on yet. Maybe something was wrong with me. How did everyone know exactly what to do? I thought, getting slightly panicked. What if he cried and I couldn’t console him? How would I know if he was hungry or sad or in pain? No one had told me that in the aftermath of the birth, I would feel so completely at sea.

  What if, after everything we had gone through, I wasn’t able to bond with my baby? What if I wasn’t cut out to be a mother at all?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Henry slept a lot the first couple of weeks of his life. His pediatrician had told me to exclusively breastfeed him to establish my supply and to make sure he didn’t get too accustomed to a bottle, so if he wasn’t asleep, he wa
s on the boob. But breastfeeding hadn’t become much easier than it initially had been those first couple of days in the hospital. I was still using a nipple shield, fumbling to get it on while Matt held Henry before placing him on my lap. Then he would scrabble around for my nipple with his little mouth and try to latch. If he didn’t latch right away, I would try to adjust the angle of his head, or squeeze my nipple to try to get it into his mouth. But most of the time, even when he did latch, it was incredibly painful—I winced every time he suckled—and sometimes tears came to my eyes.

  My breasts also got clogged constantly. A clog is like a very painful knot in your breast that can show up anywhere—sometimes it was on my underboob, sometimes it was by my armpit, sometimes it was practically at my sternum. Wherever it was, I would try to unclog it by pressing down on it as Henry nursed, which was doubly painful.

  I googled “what to do when your boob is clogged,” and the internet told me to get on all fours, with Henry underneath me, and dangle my breast into his mouth, while simultaneously pressing on the clog. I set him up on our bed and got on my hands and knees. He started screaming. I had never felt more kinship with a cow.

  One night, my breasts were in so much pain that I couldn’t sleep. I tried applying a warm compress to them, which didn’t help, and then the internet said I could try a cold compress, so I took an ice pack out of the freezer, stood in front of my bathroom mirror, and put it directly on my breast. It felt good. I held it there for a few minutes, and then it started to feel really, really cold—almost burning. “Shit,” I muttered as I removed the compress and looked in the mirror. I had given myself what looked like a third-degree burn, so now I was in the pain of still having a clog and having the skin on my breast essentially burned off. Under normal circumstances, I probably would have freaked out more than I did, but because I was so exhausted and overwhelmed and just so sick of having to deal with my boobs constantly, all day, every day, that a third-degree boob burn seemed like just one more thing in the pile of crap I needed to deal with.

  I slathered some Neosporin on it and covered it with a bandage and tried to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, we took Henry to the doctor for his two-week checkup. The pediatrician put him on the scale and frowned. “Hmm,” she said. “He still isn’t back to birth weight.”

  “That’s bad, I guess?” I said.

  “Well, by now we usually like to see them get back to their birth weight, yes,” she said. “How’s the breastfeeding going?”

  “I wouldn’t say great,” I said. “I’m still using the nipple shields and he has trouble latching, and because of the shields I can’t really tell how much he’s getting.”

  “Okay,” she said. “So starting immediately I’d like you to start giving him bottles a few times a day, so you have a better idea of how much food he’s actually getting.”

  I felt terrible. My inability to successfully breastfeed was affecting my baby’s development. Before Henry was born, I had told myself that I wouldn’t be one of those moms who became obsessed with breastfeeding above all else; I firmly believed that “fed is best,” and we’d given Henry some formula in the hospital while my milk still hadn’t fully come in. But breastfeeding also felt like something that I should know how to do, one of those motherly instinct things that you were just supposed to pick up right away. Not being able to breastfeed my baby was yet another way in which I felt like I wasn’t measuring up. That must have been why he was sleeping so much—he was hungry.

  When we got home, Matt sat down on the couch in our office and I handed him a bottle. Henry started wailing; he wasn’t able to immediately latch on to the bottle. “He’s starving,” Matt said, and tears came to his eyes. “We’ve been starving him.” Then he was fully sobbing. “I feel awful,” he said.

  “We’re doing the best we can,” I said. I couldn’t help but think this was meant as an implicit judgment of me and my motherly instincts. Surely I should have known that he wasn’t getting enough food—shouldn’t I? But how was I to know? And we had caught it at the doctor before things had gotten dire. Henry finally latched on to the bottle and drank the whole thing.

  * * *

  —

  EVERYONE SAYS THE sleeplessness of having a newborn is unlike anything they’d ever experienced, but in the same way that I had heard about pregnancy nausea but hadn’t been able to really conceive of what it felt like, I had had no idea how waking up four times or more each night to feed a newborn, fumbling in the dark for a nipple shield, praying that he would actually latch and eat, and then not being able to fall back asleep really felt.

  It’s not just that I was exhausted in those first few weeks and months after having Henry; it was that the thought of just leaving the house seemed incredibly overwhelming. Impossible, even. Undoubtedly this was in part because of my C-section—truly, I never realized how much I actually used my abs until I had completely lost the use of them. Just getting out of bed was a tears-inducing pain; I had to roll over to my side and then sort of shimmy myself up on my elbow, swing my legs around, wince, and then slowly stand up and shuffle to the bathroom. I felt lingering pain that was not acute, but affected everything I did, in a way that was entirely foreign to me. It was there in every step I took, every time I wanted to reach up to get something down from a shelf, every time I got dressed and saw the bandaged scar above my pubic bone. I had thought that once I had the baby I would begin to reclaim my body from the visitor of the last nine months, but instead I felt more estranged from my body than before. When you think about it, of course it made sense: My internal organs had been temporarily removed, and another human who’d been gestating in there for the better part of a year was also removed, and now he lived with us. I was so focused on keeping this new human alive that I almost forgot that my body had undergone major surgery. I needed to be kind to it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Before I had Henry, my impression of motherhood was that babies were demanding little creatures, but it was no problem to, say, take a newborn to a restaurant and have them sleep in the stroller, or swing by someone’s house for dinner with the baby asleep in the car seat, or hang out with friends with your baby strapped adorably to your body in a carrier. Once I had a newborn, though, I realized that this is true only for a very small—let’s say, infinitesimally small—segment of parents, and it is these parents who are ruining things for the rest of us.

  What no one tells you is that taking a small baby on a picnic, or to a happy hour, or really, anywhere outside your home is actually a huge pain in the ass. You wouldn’t know it, though, from following some new moms on Instagram. It’s not news that people present their “best” selves, or at least, their carefully curated selves, on social media, and that people’s Instagram feeds do not reflect reality. I knew this, and was occasionally guilty of it myself, and yet. AND. YET. I couldn’t help but look at these photos and not only think Why am I not taking my week-old baby to that happy hour/picnic/beach day? but also Why do I have no desire to take my week-old baby to that happy hour/picnic/beach day?

  Because if you follow a certain kind of parent on Instagram with a small child, you would be forgiven if you thought that all new mothers (and some fathers) do is have picnics. You know the kinds of photos I’m talking about: a family lying on a blanket in a park, their babe cooing as the parents beam at their perfect spawn. Or the pictures of the moms sitting in a park wearing a long flowy dress while their baby sucks contentedly from their breast. Or a picnic on a beach with a baby, or a picnic on a magical roof deck at sunset with a baby, the city lights twinkling in the distance.

  One mom I know posted a picture on Instagram literally one week after giving birth to her second child that said “Baby’s first happy hour!” with a Bon Appetit Test Kitchen–level cheese board in the background. I was in awe and slightly jealous: At one week postpartum I was still in mesh pan
ties, taking painkillers, and barely getting out of bed. I was struggling to nurse and pump and was staring down the barrel of a schedule that went roughly like this: Baby wakes up, change baby’s diaper, feed baby, try to put baby down for another nap, start crying forty-five minutes later because he will not sleep. Repeat ad nauseam. I was also lucky if I ate a gram of protein each day. The thought of leaving the house, and drinking wine and eating cheese, was not just completely outside the realm of possibility, but also seemed vaguely nauseating.

  Another thing I never really comprehended before I gave birth was the significance of the diaper bag. Surely it just entailed a bag…with diapers. Maybe some wipes? How complicated could that be? Couldn’t I just use the Madewell tote I already had? Well. It turns out that a diaper bag also needs to have a change of clothes (or two), a changing pad, and a roll of baggies to dispose of poopy diapers. If you’re bottle-feeding, it should have a prepared bottle or at least some formula. You of course need a couple of burp cloths and a bib or two. Don’t forget the pacifier, but you’ll probably need an extra just in case it goes missing, which it tends to do, because pacifiers are the socks of baby life—they just go missing. (Don’t even get me started on baby socks.) You can literally be staring at a pacifier and it will disappear in front of your very eyes. It’s like you’ve learned how to be a magician without even realizing it. Also, the pacifier will, 100 percent of the time, go missing at the exact moment that your baby has a complete meltdown, often in the one public place you ever take your baby when he or she is four weeks old, which is the doctor’s office. (That is, unless you are an Instagram influencer who takes their perfectly chill baby to happy hours.)