Fourth Trimester : And You Thought Labor Was Hard... Advice, Humor, and Inspiration for New Moms on Surviving the First Six Weeks--And Beyond

by Einhorn, Amy

• ISBN13: 9780812991062
• ISBN10: 0812991060
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Crown Pub

Summary

The thank-you note real moms in the Fourth Trimester would like to send: Dear ________ : Thanks for sending us ________ . I'm sure __________ will love it as soon as _______ can do anything besides eat, sleep, cry, and run up the stock price on Pampers. Having recently entered the Fourth Trimester, right now my goals in life are to sleep more than three hours and shower before 7:00 p.m. So please excuse this impersonal note. I'd love for you to come over and see _________ . But no helpful hints, no critiquing of the fact that I (1) breast-feed without a cover-up; (2) do not breast-feed and use formula; (3) allow my child to use a pacifier; (4) use a Swyngo-matic to hypnotize my child into a state eerily similar to an Ecstasy trip. Do not tell me that __________ looks cute. I know that __________ looks like a cross between E.T. and Yoda. And no comments about my figure. I am not Cindy Crawford and, yes, those are maternity clothes I'm still wearing. Bring rain gear and you'll be well prepared for the nonstop torrent of liquid escaping from __________ and me. Can't wait to see you -- of course, these days I'm even looking forward to having my mom and mother-in-law visit. I'll take whatever adult company I can get. Love and kisses from me and the pumpkin!

Author Biography

AMY EINHORN is a book editor in New York City.

Excerpts

Chapter One

There's a reason they call it labor.

Recovering from labor is the closest thing most women come to recuperating from a heavyweight fight. Chances are you were pushing for hours on end, you didn't sleep a bit, and you feel like you've been run over by a truck. If you had a vaginal delivery, and an episiotomy or tearing to boot, you are going to be sore and in serious pain. If you had a C-section, you've had major abdominal surgery and you're going to be in more serious pain. This is very easy to forget. Just because people have them all the time doesn't change this fact. Since it bears repeating, again, you've had major abdominal surgery. Don't try to do everything, in fact, don't try to do anything. Just sleep, feed the baby, and get waited on hand and foot. Sooner than you would like, everyone will leave and it will be just you and the baby, fending for yourselves.

This is not a Tylenol commercial.

When I was leaving the hospital, I assumed I'd be getting some medicine to take with me. But when I asked my doctor for a prescription he laughed: "The medicine you're taking is so strong, you could fall down flat on your face on the sidewalk and you wouldn't feel a thing," he said. The painkillers they give you in the hospital are incredibly powerful. Take away all of the endorphins and hormones floating around, and the fact is, you're much weaker than you feel. It's easy to try and be a martyr and forgo the medicine, especially if you're nursing and nervous that the drugs will cross into your milk. Don't be a fool. You might have delivered without an epidural, okay, you are woman, we've heard you roar, now take some medicine if your doctor gives it to you and be kind to yourself. This is not the Olympics. While people might be impressed that you delivered without an epidural, no one's going to pat you on the back for a drug-free postgame show. Pain medication from your doctor won't hurt the baby (your baby will be taking Tylenol soon enough), and it will make your recovery a heck of a lot more comfortable. Recovering from labor is painful, whether you've had a vaginal or a cesarean. Remember, there are no brownie points for suffering.

You will get no sleep in the hospital.

Maternity wards are actually set up to allow you the least amount of sleep possible. A possible reason for this is to delude you into the sensation that you are sleeping more when you get home with your newborn so you'll think you have the swing of things. When you come home, you will be exhausted. Try to get out of the hospital as soon as possible.

The milkwoman cometh.

You may have thought your breasts got big when you became pregnant. Well, when your milk comes in, you will look like you've developed grapefruits or cantaloupes (along with all of those little weird blue lines) for breasts. Except these babies will be rock hard.

It might seem that although your stomach has gone down, in fact, all that mass just made its way higher up and settled in your breasts. Wasn't it supposed to be what comes in must come out? Did someone forget that? The good news is that your breasts will get softer and go down (and down and down and down). So don't get flipped out if your bra size is somewhere so deep into the alphabet that you didn't even know they made bras that big. And whatever you do, don't rush out (or have others go out for you) and buy nursing bras during these first few days. This is temporary, your breasts will get softer, and smaller, so don't throw money down the drain buying bras that will only fit you for a week. The other neat little surprise is not only do your breasts get huge, but when your milk comes in, they hurt like hell. Is it possible that it hurts more than labor? Yep. Unfortunately, they don't give epidurals for your milk coming in (though perhaps any doctors reading this should get to work on that). Again, this too shall pass.

If you are breast-feeding, it will hurt.

A lot. Chances are, if you are a new mom, you won't know what you're doing. Use the lactation consultants in the hospital. And if need be, pay for a private lactation consultant. It will be the best money you've ever spent (and you'll more than make up for it in the money you save on formula).

Yes, it might seem that all you need to do is whip out your breast, how difficult can it be? Very hard. And even if you know what you're doing, it takes time for your nipples to adjust from being sensory playthings to being pulled on and tweaked more often than a dairy cow's teat. You'll probably be tempted, very tempted, to give up. Especially after your first cracked nipple, first breast infection, or first clogged duct. (Helpful hint: Get your partner to massage your breast if you get a clog, it actually helps break up the clog, and they'll think it's sensual and that they're getting to cop a feel. It will be one of the rare times when you will allow them to touch your breast.) Oh, the joys of breast-feeding! But if you can stick with it, breast-feeding can be one of the most rewarding things you'll ever do. So think of it like everything else in life, coffee, beer, sex, at first it sucks (sorry) but eventually it gets better and better, to the point that you actually like it.

Did they forget the "maternal" in the maternity ward?

Some maternity ward nurses can be wonderful. But some can be downright mean. While the nurses on the delivery floor might be angels from up on high, unfortunately, often the nurses in the maternity ward are their counterparts from hell. They've seen a thousand babies, they know more than you do, and they love to lord it over you. They'll criticize how you hold the baby, how you nurse him, how you burp him. While you pick up your little darling every time he makes a noise, they seem to take their sweet time picking him up out of the nursery even though he's screaming his little lungs out and turning purple. Are they deaf? No. They're nurses, and this is just their job. Take what they say with a grain of salt and don't listen to everything they tell you. (No, you can't bottle-feed and breast-feed at the beginning, as one of them wrongly told my roommate in the hospital.) And whatever you do, don't expect to get compassion and sympathy from them, but as long as they keep the painkillers coming, God bless 'em.

Remember whose baby this is.

At the beginning, you will be doing everything wrong. Your mother and mother-in-law will give you helpful hints. This is, shall we say, the tip of the iceberg, a harbinger of the rest of your life as long as you remain on this earth. Your mom will insist the baby needs to put on the new bouclé sweater she bought because she can feel a draft even though the air-conditioning in the hospital broke down and it's a balmy ninety degrees; your mother-in-law will tell you to be careful of the camera's flash around the baby's eyes. Hard as it may seem to comprehend, they're only doing it because they care about the baby, not because they love to see you squirm. You're feeling so insecure about this mom-thing that your reaction to them is, shall we say, severe. After all, if they told you to vote for Donald Trump, you'd just laugh and shrug it off. However, since this is a subject about which they supposedly know something about, you think there's got to be something to what they're saying. The fact is, sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. You're the mom, and though you might not feel like you know what you're doing, you've actually spent more time with your baby and know him better than anyone else (yes, although the baby probably looks nothing like you, you weren't just a cocoon; that time in the womb does count for something). Just remember that from this time onward, your interactions with your mother and mother-in-law will be even more strained than before you had the baby (I know, hard to believe). But don't worry, you get payback in free babysitting, which you soon will be so grateful for that you'll be looking forward to having your mom and mother-in-law over as often as possible (I know, hard to believe).

There's no such thing as a parenting expert.

Even the so-called "experts" will give you conflicting advice. "Have the baby sleep on its back." But doesn't that thingy you bought at the baby store that has some parents' award seal of approval on it show the baby sleeping on its side? Some will tell you to have the baby sleep in the bed with you, while others will say whatever you do, don't have the baby sleep with you. Your friends who just had babies seem to have read the entire section in the bookstore on parenting advice, and borrowed their cousin-who-is-in-med-school's physiology books as well, and can quote page numbers when reciting Penelope Leach. You, on the other hand, are feeling rather sheepish for only having read What to Expect and dipped into some other books here and there. Not to worry, hard as it is to believe, people have been raising children for thousands of years without books or parenting experts. So take a deep breath, count to infinity, and realize that if everyone agreed on one right way to do everything, life would be pretty boring, not to mention that the parenting shelves in the bookstores would be pretty bare.

What's so sanitary about sanitary pads?

"Sanitary pad" is an oxymoron. You may never have used a sanitary pad in your life, but this has obviously now changed. Forget your good friend the tampon and say hello to what feels suspiciously like a diaper.

While you haven't had your period in around eleven months, congratulations, it's all been stored up waiting to blow. You're literally going to be a bloody mess for some time, a gusher for the first week, and some women can be spotting for up to two months after birth. So reacquaint yourself with the sanitary pad counter in the drugstore. And have more respect for your mother and grandmother for whom OB was nothing more than two letters in the alphabet.

The only person getting on the scale should be the baby.

People will be bringing you lots of food in the hospital and at home. Chocolate, cookies, good stuff. While you always hear that having a baby will make you lose twenty pounds immediately, "immediate" is a relative term. You'll be tempted to weigh yourself right away to see that scale you've been staring down every week at the doctor's office plummet back down into your old neighborhood. Well, don't weigh yourself until at least a week after you've had the baby. If you've had a C-section, you've been pumped with enough fluid to fill a small portion of the Mississippi. Although your baby might weigh upward of eight pounds, chances are you'll have only lost a couple more than that. This will be depressing. So don't get on the scale, and eat those cookies. While being a baby is the only time in your life when it's cute to have chubby thighs, having just had a baby is the only time in your life when you can be overweight without apology. You're no longer doing the baby any harm by eating junk (unless you're breast-feeding, but now the Best-Odds diet police won't arrest you for having a piece of chocolate cake), and no one's expecting you to be in a bathing suit anytime soon. So forget about Weight Watchers and enjoy that Godiva.

Everyone poops, including post labor moms, unfortunately.

While peeing may not pose too much of a problem (though it may sting or burn, especially if you've had an episiotomy or been torn), many women approach their first postbirth bowel movement with more trepidation than labor. Chances are it will not be as bad as you anticipate, the thought is worse than the actual movement itself. After all, if you pushed out your baby, you will be able to push out the remnants of that horrible hospital food you ate, no matter how daunting an idea that may be.

If the thought of going to the bathroom terrifies you, ask the nurses or your doctor for some stool softener to help ease you back into your routine. Because your days of quality reading time on the toilet are over, from now on you're going to have to be quick, quick, quick.

If you had a C-section, the nurses and doctors are going to be asking you if you are having gas. No, it's not because they're strange, and it's not because your room smells. They want to make sure that everything is back in working order. After all that they cut through and messed around with in there, it's no wonder they're concerned.

The baby doesn't look like either of you, but does look like the love-child of Yoda and E.T.

No matter what anyone says, newborns are not pretty. In fact, they're downright funny looking. Many look like the children of Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin's Conehead family. Just think about how bad you feel having come through labor. Well, they were the ones whose heads had to be squeezed through ten centimeters.

Before your baby begins to come into her own look, she will be a bit like Madonna, adopting various guises: Cyclops, one eye open, the other closed; a Grateful Dead groupie, doing a weird little dance with her hands over her head and in front of her face as if she's tripping on acid; a chicken, just check out those scrawny legs. Don't worry, soon it will become apparent that your babe is, for better or worse, related to you.

At first she may look exactly like your husband. There's an old wives' tale that says that newborns start out looking like their fathers to prove paternity (which, come to think about it, isn't so off-the-wall), but by a year, your fifty percent will be showing its face.

Ahoy Ahab!

The baby is gone, but your stomach looks suspiciously like whale blubber. At first you may be in awe at how flat it is compared with how huge you were before you gave birth. That marvel will soon turn into a morbid fascination with the wide expanse of your stomach. Somehow your abdominal region resembles a vast, rolling plain, a desert with peaks and valleys and no end in sight.

You need to think of your stomach like a giant batch of Silly Putty that's been stretched out to cover the entire Sunday paper. It will go back to its original size, but it will take lots of massaging in order for it to fit back in that little egg. Realize that this will take time, and time and time, but what it's not time for is starting a Pilates class or any extensive sit-up regime. Give your body time to readjust on its own, in a few weeks, when you're feeling better, you can always help jump-start getting your body back with some exercise.

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Excerpted from The Fourth Trimester: And You Thought Labor Was Hard... Advice, Humor, and Inspiration for New Moms on Surviving the First Six Weeks--And Beyond by Amy Einhorn
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