Motherhood- Totally Unromantic

I always chuckle when I read things that mothers say. It's like being a parent puts you in the middle of some victorian romance novel. You go about pregnancy reveling in every move baby makes and glowing with pride at your curvateous body. When you go into labor, you are not in pain and enjoying yourself as you are getting ready to meet baby. Then you are holding your baby for the first time and in absolute awe. Then comes the feedings where you are just sitting there locking gazes with your baby as it suckles at your breast. At night you and your baby snuggle in bed then wake in the morning still exchanging those loving glances.

RIGHT!!! Let's get real here!

While pregnant, you like feeling baby kick and move all the time. Baby kicks your bladder making you feel like you are going to wet your pants. When baby kicks your cervix, you wonder if their foot is going to break through. In those last days of pregnancy, it feels like baby will just fall right out. You may have this awesome condition where you can feel bones in your pelvis rubbing together. You have to sleep propped up because of heartburn. You have to track where the bathrooms are everywhere you go. Your back is killing you. You throw up daily for the first few months or the entire pregnancy. How romantic, huh??

Childbirth. Perhaps the most unromantic thing ever. If your water breaks, you have fluid trickling from your vagina. Contractions, they do hurt, sometimes horribly! You are glad you will soon be meeting your baby, but OMG, are you going to survive this pain? You are sweating. Some women sound like horror film victims and are screaming their heads off (ie "vocalizing"). Some women want to be rubbed and touched while the rest of us will break your damn hands if you try to touch us. You are deperately trying to get this thing out of you because it fucking hurts! "No, I don't wanna touch it, just get it out"!  And you are handed something wet, bloody, and alien like. Yes, your baby is beautiful and totally worth everything you've gone through. That doesn't mean it was a romantic process. As you are holding your baby, the placenta is being delivered and then you start bleeding for a wonderous 6 weeks (give or take a few weeks). In those early days, you have to try to hold yourself when you go from lying to sitting because of the bleeding and your worry that you'll leak all over the place. Yeah, that's romantic!

Yes, it's nice to sit and nurse your baby. However, in those early days, nursing causes wicked cramping that you swear compares to labor. Your boobs swell to odd proportions leading you to believe you could star in your own porn flick or make serious money off of them. They leak like mad. You look at regular nursing pads and wonder if you should just stuff one of baby's diapers in your bra instead. When you latch baby on, the other side starts flowing. If baby cries, hello letdown. If anybody's baby cries, your body automatically thinks "milk needed" and then your shirt is wet because those tiny nursing pads aren't that absorbent. As baby gets use to nursing and is still working on latch, you swear you are nursing a piranha. If baby gets too much air or too much milk, hello regurgitated milk. Sometimes you can feel baby dripping milk as it eats and you can feel the milk running down your body. If you are nursing an older baby, they get distracted and want to play with everything in their sight whether it's your hair or earrings or shirt or mouth or nose. They unlatch so they can look all around giving strangers a nice little peep show. If you are nursing a toddler, it's pretty much the same, except they can walk up to you and say "I want boob mommy" no matter where you are! Or that same toddler can get tired while out and cry repeatedly "boob mommy, boob mommy, boob mommy" so you have to try to quickly nurse them hoping they either get full quick and stop asking or they hurry up and fall asleep!

This leads me to co-sleeping or bedsharing, whatever you want to call it. When youhear these terms you think of a family that all lays down and goes to sleep together then wake in the morning happy and refreshed. Yeah, that also does not happen. This is more like it. You have a baby/toddler that loves to sprawl out forcing you to move to that little sliver of space right on the edge while your hubby sleeps peacefully on the other side of the bed. Then you have a child or two decide they want to sleep with you too and you are sandwiched between children unable to move. You have a child that insists on sleeping ON you or your spouse. You are freezing and go to reach for blankets only to find your child totally bundled up and you have to go to the linen closet to get a blanket. As you are laying there, you have a million thoughts going through your head. You have your pet trying to get your attention because they are hungry or need to go outside. You crawl back into bed and still can't sleep. You end up dozing off only to wake up with a sore shoulder from remaining in that tiny spot you had. If you want to sleep near your spouse, you best bet is to get the baby/toddler to sleep so you can sleep in the middle, but baby/toddler decides they don't like it and crawl over you to get back in the middle. If you want to have sex, you have to either go elsewhere or hope you can keep the baby/toddler sleeping while you move them. If your child is sick, you end up being woken up by puke either on you or in your bed or both! You have to wake your spouse to change sheets while you get yourself and the baby/toddler all cleaned up. Another treat is having a not completely potty trained kid in your bed! There is nothing like waking up in a puddle! Showers and sheet changes, oh joy.

So, ladies, let's stop romanticizing these aspects of motherhood. You are doing a disservice to other women. Let's be real and honest and have a laugh over what we endure! Everything considered, I love being being a mom and I love having my kids! But there has never been anything romantic about it! Maybe another day, I'll address the joys of having older kids!