There’s a lot of body pain and exhaustion in the first few days/weeks of postpartum, so celebrating the things that feel good is important to me. Even if they seem strange! This post is going to be deeply personal and very real, so I hope you’re ready!
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| Little Nico's hand on my thumb in the wee hours of the night. |
Full Bladder
Having full use of my bladder again is a beautiful thing. I feel like it slipped away slowly as my pregnancy advanced. It was like, one day (or one middle-of-the-night, as it were) I realized my bladder is so squished up I can hardly hold anything anymore. I had to always pee before going anywhere, and if I sat down for a while it was guaranteed I’d need to pee again as soon as I stood up!
A few days after Nico’s birth, I was on the toilet and was just amazed at the amount of urine I could pass in one sitting. A full, thick stream for a good half a minute. It physically felt so good! It really did. It wasn’t like I was holding it for a long time either. Post-surgery you want to go often to keep flushing everything out. I was drinking a lot too, to help with breastfeeding. I just felt very grateful to have a full capacity bladder again.
That First Poop
I don’t know what it’s like for a mother who has a vaginal birth, I can only tell you what it’s like for me having gone through a cesarean. The surgery basically involves moving my organs around to get the baby out. Not to mention the fact that the baby itself has caused a lot of those organs to move around over the last 9 months. So, post surgery a lot of women can find themselves bunged up (constipated), and some experience incredible pain from trapped gas.
I’ve read that the body slows down digestion after birth, so perhaps the same is true for mothers who give birth vaginally.
The hospital gave me a laxative along with my pain medications to help get things moving. It was about 3 days after Nico’s birth when I finally pooped again. And just like having a full bladder pee, this felt marvelous. This poop wasn’t anything special, it just felt really good as it exited my body. I don't want to get too into it, but it was significant enough that I'm publicly sharing a poop story.
Another 48 hours passed until my next poop, which also felt great. Thank you body for getting the digestive system back on track. The following day I pooped three times. A little excessive, I thought, but OK. Then we finally settled back into my regular routine.
Never underestimate how valuable it is to move your bowels.
Sleeping on my back
I love sleeping on my back. It’s the absolute most comfortable position I like to spend 8 hours of the day in (or night, I suppose).
During pregnancy, they generally warn you off this. Especially in the later half of the pregnancy when the baby gets bigger and could press against the major vein that services the placenta. You don’t want to challenge the blood supply to the baby.
This means that earlier than necessary I started to train myself for side sleep. I want to make sure that by the time I have a big baby, my body will be used to getting sleep on my side. Previous advice suggested the left side was best, but my OBGYN informed me that the latest research is starting to debunk that.
While I was pregnant with Max, the piercing I had in the top of my left ear (helix is the name for the piercing) began to ache and sting from the pressure of my head resting on my ear all night. Finally Steve suggested I try taking it out, something I hadn't done since getting it pierced at the age of 21. I removed the piercing and felt instant relief! Sad to be missing that piece of jewelry (I never did put it back in), but grateful for better sleep.
I slept terribly in my third trimester. I found side sleep so uncomfortable, even with the support and comfort of my C shaped pregnancy pillow. When I had sciatica it was even worse because I couldn't switch sides as much. That resulted in my left leg and hip bearing most of the burden.
Sleeping in bed overnight at the hospital was not comfortable. It’s the first night post surgery, so lying flat felt really strange for my abs - stretching them out felt very odd. The bed was mechanical, I could keep my head raised a little or my legs up. I don’t think I lay flat at all.
The first night at home in my own bed felt like heaven. Whenever I had to sit up to breastfeed, or get up to pee, it was a challenge and painful along my incision. However, I still felt a huge sense of comfort from lying on my back, my head once again resting on the best pillow purchase of my life (and trust me, I’ve purchased many pillows to find The One).
It may seem trivial, but again, for me it’s well worth celebrating the ability to once again sleep on my back. Even if it’s not for a solid 8-hour stretch!
Intense Dreams
I love dreaming and waking up to reflect on the hidden meaning. For my birthday last year, Steve gave me a dream journal. I often wake up after a dream, write down basic notes and then return to it in the morning to flesh out the story and try to decipher the meaning.
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| Photo: Johannes Plenio via unsplash.com |
Newborns need to be fed a lot, all through the day and night. Every 2-3 hours, starting from the beginning of each feed. Babies are born with stomachs the size of a single cherry, so they don’t need a lot to feel full, but they get hungry often. Over the first week it will grow to the size of an apricot, by a month old it’s the size of a large chicken egg.
In the early postpartum days, I was getting very little sleep. It was broken up into 45 mins to 1.5 hour periods. Often not enough time to fall into a deep sleep. Also, I think in the early days, your brain is always keeping an ear out for the baby, just in case. So you’re not going to drift too far into a deep sleep.
Additionally, any breastfeeding parent will tell you, it's extremely exhausting work! It’s like your body is literally being drained. I had to constantly drink water and eat trail mix to stay alive and awake enough to wrestle the baby into the right position at my breast.
With those limited sleep windows and full on exhaustion, I had the most intense dreams ever. I wish I had the time to write them all down because now the memory of them is a blur and all I’m left with is the lingering sense of amazement at how creative and colorful my brain was at that time.
I don’t remember the full details, but in one dream, I was called Max and there was a woman in the dream also called Max, and she was trying to get me to eat asparagus. There were also dreams with a lot of water, swimming under the surface. Another time, I was in some kind of Bond style car chase.
The worst dream I had was one in which I took Max to a woman’s house, and she made us bagels with cream cheese. In this dream, the premise was that she would be adopting Max and I had taken him there to get to know her and make sure it was a good fit. I woke up and cried after that one. Talk about mom guilt. I was feeling so bad for him. He wasn't napping at daycare and he was having meltdowns at home. Just signs of him trying to adapt to the big changes.
While that dream was a nightmare, many of the others in the early days were much more pleasant, mystical and obscure. Postpartum dreams were a joy and something worth celebrating. Now that my sleep (quantity) has improved, the exhaustion driven dreams have chilled out too.
Postpartum Weight Loss
Do I need to tell you that I don’t hate my body in order to talk about how good it feels to drop 20lbs in less than two weeks?
By the final month of my pregnancy I felt so huge. That was fine, I had a big belly holding a 6lb 12oz baby. My stomach hit the dinner table before I could pull my chair in far enough to eat comfortably. Eating required a kind of rocking motion: lean forward to shovel the fork into my mouth without spilling on the aforementioned belly, lean back to feel comfortable, and chew.
The extra weight made my hips hurt at night. I had sciatica down one side of my body, which would sometimes flare up and cause me to falter mid step, or seize up and yelp in pain. It just wasn’t comfortable.
About a week and a half after Nico was born, I noticed my maternity leggings felt much looser. A couple of pairs of maternity pants slipping down too often to be comfortable. I kept wearing the maternity pants because typically you do retain some of the weight after birth, and also many “normal” pants would rub against my cesarean incision, which needs to heal.
When I had Max, I didn’t lose weight quickly. My body was a novice at the pregnancy thing and seemed to want to hold on to whatever it could. My dad was also feeding me, and he really loves making dessert. After a month or so about 10lbs came off, but I had to work hard to lose any more weight. Which I had wanted to do to fit into my clothes again, and to feel physically comfortable.
Recently I looked in the mirror at my postpartum body, still marked with stretch marks, a gnarly incision covered in a special glue “bandaid”, and the red markings of a rash caused by either whatever they washed me with pre-surgery or the binder they wrapped me in afterwards (which I wore for 3 days straight). I was struck by how “back to normal” it looked, my belly looked “flat by recent standards! I actually thought, wow I look pretty good. Hello again to my own body without a baby inside, without a crushed bladder, without sciatica.
I curiously pulled out the bathroom scales to see what I was working with. At the hospital, when I checked in, I weighed 210lbs, but I want to note that the morning before I had been weighed at a doctor’s visit at 212lbs. I like to think I had lost 2lbs of liquid when my waters broke! In my bathroom, the scale read 193lb. I was simultaneously shocked by the significant loss, and also relieved that I wouldn’t have to fight and work so hard to shed that first 20lbs to get back to a comfortable pre-pregnancy weight.
Allegedly, a “healthy” weight for me would be up to 150lbs (according to that ridiculous BMI calculator the medical folks use). That’s not going to happen. It’s just not my natural way of moving my body, relating to my body, or fueling my body. A lot would need to change to get there. And I’m not trying to get there.
Right now, I just feel so much lighter and more comfortable in my body and that feels really good, so, for me, it’s worth celebrating.
For a little bit of balance, here’s a list of pregnancy symptoms that won’t be missed
Leaking bladder (did you even know that’s a thing?)
Leaking vagina (why?!)
Sciatica (ouch)
Being kicked in the crotch (aka “lightning crotch” - Max did it way more with his breech legs dangling down there, but Nico got his fair share of head butts in, especially close to his birth)
Being kicked in the ribs and generally having no space up there for ME
Itchy skin (OK if I’m being honest, I mean itchy breasts. For some reason this pregnancy my boobs were just so itchy! It would come and go, but it was always annoying.)
The nausea of the first trimester
The general exhaustion of the whole 9 months
Pregnancy insomnia. I would add this to the list, but my postpartum sleep isn’t much better! In the final few months of pregnancy, I was so tired by the time 9pm came around, and then I would be waking up between the hours of 2 and 4am. Sometimes if I was lucky I could get back to sleep after an hour or two. Sometimes I just couldn’t. And it’s funny that now, my sleep is quite similar, although a little more broken up. I still need to go to bed by 9pm, and I’m up 2-3 times a night.
I'll be getting around to writing about Nico's birth in my next post. For now it's been fun to reflect on some of the simple pleasures in my postpartum experience.
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