The Highs and Lows of the Newborn Phase

I've done this whole newborn thing twice before, you know.  You would think I would be prepared - that I would know exactly what to expect, and exactly what I am doing.

Not so.

I had forgotten.  About the highs.  About the lows.  So here they are:

The Highs

The biggest high is that I am completely in love with this boy.

I could stare at him all day (and in fact, I do spend an inordinate amount of time staring at him).  I love his faces - his pooping face, his involuntary smiling face, his sleepy face, his stretching face, and any other type of face he happens to make.  I love watching him on the changing pad scrunching up his little body and looking at his little frog legs.  I love feeding him and all the funny sounds that he makes. I love having him fall asleep on my chest and feeling his breath against my body and just keeping him there for a while. I love his smell and his eyes and his cheeks and basically every single last thing about him.

I just love this little boy.

In other good news, I have lost 25 pounds.

The Lows

Okay, now that I have painted a pretty, romantic picture, let me be real about the lows: The newborn phase is its own unique form of hell.  For the following reasons:

Two Kind of Crazy, Out of Character, Things I Did

I would not describe myself as a naturalist, holistic, granola type of person.  I do buy organic food when I can, but I still take my kids to McDonalds.  I recycle, but I don't really think about my carbon footprint. I'm into vitamins and homeopathic remedies, but I'm ready and willing to go to hard core meds when necessary.  I'm just kind of plain vanilla average in this regard.

But last week, I did some out of character things: 

1) I did a natural (as in, no epidural) birth.

I don't know why, but having a natural birth always appealed to me.  Perhaps because of a fear of sticking a needle in my spine, or a fear of escalating interventions that would lead to a c-section. But really, it just always felt, for lack of a better word, natural to me.  As in, we women are meant to birth babies.  It's how nature made us.  So why not do it the way nature intended?  

When I was pregnant with Braden, my first child, I took a Bradley natural birthing class.  My husband and I went once a week and learned about birthing positions, relaxation methods, etc. But halfway through the class I ended up on bed rest, having been diagnosed with placenta previa.  For this condition, I would have to have a c-section.  I was disappointed, but resigned myself to my fate, and stopped attending the Bradley classes.  Lo and behold, a week before my scheduled c-section date, my placenta moved, and I was cleared for a vaginal delivery.  By that point, I was so out of shape and in such shock that I didn't have the energy for a natural birth.  I did try, but after a pitocin drip and 5 hours of labor, I asked for an epidural.  

For the birth of Casey, my second child, I again wanted to attempt a natural birth.  I reviewed my Bradley class materials, and took a "Comfort Measures" class at the hospital.  When I went into labor and arrived at the hospital, I told the nurses that I was going to go epidural free.  I labored for a few hours, until it started to hurt - I mean, really hurt.  Just like in the movies, I recanted my prior request and begged for the epidural.  I was 8 centimeters dilated by the time I got it.  I was almost there, but the pain (and temptation) was too much.

Lets talk about pain for a second.  In my normal, non-laboring mind, my reasoning went like this: Sure, it's going to hurt.  Really bad.  But it's temporary.  It will only last a finite amount of time.  And if I can just take it, for a little bit, it will be over!  How bad can it really be?  

Lets repeat that:  How bad can it really be?  

Halfway

This week marked the halfway mark of my third pregnancy.  20 weeks down, 20 weeks to go.

It hasn’t gone by fast. 

If this third pregnancy has solidified anything for me, it’s that I don’t like being pregnant.  It’s not that it’s awful per se, and I am so very grateful that so far this pregnancy has been complication free.  It’s just that apart from the whole miracle of birth and the kicks that I’m starting to feel (which I do love), it’s not that much fun.  It’s a denial of things I would normally indulge in (oh margaritas and raw oysters, how I miss you).  It’s an overindulgence of food and desserts to make up for the denial of my normal indulgences, resulting in a steady weight gain that I swore wouldn’t happen to me this pregnancy.  It’s a welcome of all too familiar discomfort – of not being able to sleep on my stomach, of heartburn, of back pain, of headaches I can’t cure with advil.  It’s the dawn of a new kind of anxiety – a kind I had forgotten about – where you pray and beg the weeks to go by until your baby is viable, until his lungs are developed, until he weights more and more – so God forbid, should you deliver early, he will be okay. 

Notwithstanding the fact that I’ve been through this before and I know what’s to come (aka, my life won't be all that easy upon giving birth either), I find myself breaking a cardinal rule of mine and living outside of the moment; of counting down the weeks.  Only 20 weeks left to go, was my mantra throughout much of this week.  Only 20 weeks until I get my body back, until I get my life back, until I am not pregnant anymore. 

Only I WON’T get my life back in 20 weeks.  My life, and the lives of my husband and family, will be forever changed.  It will be a positive change, about which I will someday say, “I can’t imagine I ever had a life before this little boy” – exactly what I say about my first two boys.  But the fact is, this life I have now, that I have gotten used to, embraced, and found comfort in, will never return to me. 

Riding the Zoloft Roller Coaster

I love zoloft.

I really do.  It has saved me numerous times.  Every time I think it won't.  I think, what the hell can a pill do for me?  I start taking it and I still don't believe.  But then....

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  So this is what it feels like to be normal.

I have been taking it on and off since my early twenties.  In the beginning, once I started feeling "normal,"  I would think, See, I'm fine!  I don't need to be on medication!  

Then I would go off of it, and I would be fine for a while.  Until I wasn't again.  And so began yet another cycle of anxiety... feeling fine, feeling anxious, feeling too anxious to go on medication, finally going on medication, feeling fine again, going off the medication etc.    The cycles can go for months, or years.  But the bottom line is, after a decade or so, I have been humbled (a postpartum episode will do that to you).  Can I live without it?  Yes.  Is life a bit more enjoyable while I'm on it.  YES.

A Personal Therapy History (And why I want to invite my therapist over for dinner)

You'd think that because both of my parents are therapists that I always would have been open to the idea of going to therapy.  But I wasn't. 

It wasn't that I was against it per se, it was just that I saw it as an emergency measure.  I went to my first therapist when I was in law school.  I was having random panic attacks in the middle of class for no apparent reason.  Nothing I would ever let on to anyone else, but that feeling of your face going white, your heart racing, and the walls caving in - standard anxiety stuff.  After a few weeks of this I ended up in some twenty-something's office at student health begging for xanax.  Instead, she recommended some SSRI's and weekly therapy sessions.  I never took the pills, and I never went back. 

Fast forward three years and I found myself in another therapist's office on the twentieth floor of a high rise in Central Park West.  I was working at Skadden at the time, and was in such a state of flux that by 10am I was on the phone searching for someone, anyone, who would see me that day - the sooner the better.  By 2pm I was in this random therapist's office crying about how stressed I was and how I just couldn't finish this brief - I just couldn't.  I still remember his words:  "Fuck the brief."  But I didn't.  I went back to work and finished it.  It was my 28th birthday.  I never went back to him again. 

Fog Lifting

I have been feeling oddly happy lately. 

Not that I don't have reasons to be happy - I have countless reasons.  But I have also had some reasons to be sad.  And angry.  And then add in an emotional breakdown and an acute anxiety episode and I've been hanging on by a thread a lot of the time. 

But for the past few weeks, I've just been calm. 

In early July my insomnia came back with a vengeance and I have been back on sleeping pills ever since.  I HATE this.  I HATE taking a pill to go to sleep.  I have accepted having to take other medications in my life, but these sleeping pills just make me angry.  The ones I take aren't technically "addicting," but for me, I think they are mentally addicting because I start to feel like I can't sleep without them.  So each night becomes a challenge - can I do it?  Which inevitably means no, I can't, because when you think about sleep, it doesn't come. 

A Letter to My Anxiety

Dear Anxiety,

It had been a while since I had seen you.  Over 18 months, in fact, since you paid me an unwelcome visit right after Casey was born.  I thought I had bid you good riddance.  But unfortunately, you decided to stop in a few weeks ago.

You came out of nowhere, but that's what you tend to do.  You reared your ugly head on my first day of vacation.  You laughed in my face at the timing.

And oh, you were so familiar.  You started in slow, with some uneasy thoughts.  You got my heart racing.  And then you hit me hard the same way you did last time - you didn't let me go to sleep.

You said some pretty crappy things to me.  Things like, "See what's happening, Shannon?  You're slipping back into a postpartum episode.  This one is going to be worse than last time."  And "You thought you were off your medication?  That you were in the clear?  Ha!"  And "I so am going to ruin your vacation."

Ultimately, you gave me the all familiar mantra - your favorite: "You'll never sleep normally again. In fact, you won't sleep at all.  And the lack of sleep will make you crazy.  And once you are crazy, you will live the rest of your life strapped to a gurney in a mental institution and your children will never know you."

The Good, the Bad

Lets start with the good...

- I am in Cape Cod.
- I have already eaten at Rookies, Box Lunch, and Mac's Shack.  (Not all glamorous, but the best food ever).
- I also went here yesterday during naptime for oysters and a beer.
- The weather is perfect.
- The timing is perfect (aka, I am not without power in 100 degree heat back at home.  I can't say the same for my husband. I have a knack for avoiding these sorts of things).
- I found via a Facebook status that a friend of mine that I haven't seen in years is in Cape Cod too, and we are having lunch tomorrow.
- My husband, sister, aunt, and cousins will be here later this week.
- I'M ON VACATION.

And then the bad...

- Casey has a 102 fever and I'm not quite sure what to do with him.
- The trip here was LONG and sucked and unpacking everything sans a husband is the worst.
- My insomnia has come back in full force. It started last week for no explicable reason and it's causing me to spiral downward a bit. My psychiatrist thinks it may be a second post partum episode, which apparently can happen anytime in the first two years.  I'm kind of struggling to be honest.

But overall, I'd say the good outweighs the bad.  I am trying to remind myself that.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

The weather this past weekend was downright depressing.  Cold, rainy, gloomy, curl up in pajama type weather.  It was a premature reminder of the dark months to come.

For the past four years, I have fallen into a winter funk from mid-November - February.  I can't say it's depression per se, but I generally am sluggish, bored, unmotivated, and never wanting to leave the house because it's too damn cold - just blah.  I find myself crossing days off of the calendar and counting down the days until daylight savings time.  I think this funk has been the result of one or more of the following factors:

- morning sickness
- post partum depression
- the drafting of a ridiculous number of deposition outlines with a completely unmanageable deadline
- a crying newborn
- a lack of sleep
- sunsets before 5pm
- the self loathing of post-baby weight
- the announcement of salary freezes
- an impending return from maternity leave
- the stress of childcare to cover impending return to maternity leave
- Snowmageddon (twice - once resulting in a tree falling on my house)

Among others.

Watch Out World - I'm (Almost) Off My Meds!

Last week, Casey turned 9 months old.  Each month birthday is documented by a picture of Casey holding a sign ("I'm 9 months old today!"), an entry in the baby book, and the checking off of various milestones.  But it also is a darker anniversary for me.  With each month, I think - "It was [9] months ago that I almost lost my mind."

As I've mentioned on this blog before, I had a serious bout of post partum depression with Casey. Serious in that it came on fast and strong.

The pregnancy had been uneventful, and the delivery surprisingly easy and fast.  I checked into the hospital at 3am on October 20th, and Casey was born by 8:50am.  I was up and walking around a couple of hours later.  He was perfect.  During those days in the hospital, I was a little weepy and very sleep deprived, but nothing out of the ordinary.  I had done this before, and I remembered the "baby blues" that pretty much everyone experiences those first few days or weeks.

When I arrived home, things quickly took a downward spiral.  Braden was very upset at the arrival of his new baby brother, and I remember coming home and holding him as he cried, and crying myself.  Not tears of joy, sleeplessness, or frustration - scary, sad tears.  I didn't know why.  That night, my mom stayed over ready to take on overnight baby duty, and I showered and got in bed at 9pm, ready to get a few precious hours before feeding time.  The next feed came, and I hadn't yet fallen asleep.  This pattern continued all night.  By 9am the next morning, it was official - I had not gotten a wink of sleep.

The Dust Starts to Settle

It dawned on me the other day that my life is finally calming down a bit.  It's been a crazy year.

A year ago today, I was 6 months pregnant living in our basement while our kitchen was being renovated (a nightmare, nightmare, nightmare).    Once our upstairs was ours again, Braden turned 2 and started preschool.  A month later, I had Casey.  I went a bit crazy.  Braden went a bit crazy.  My husband stayed fairly sane, but his workload didn't.  Sleep deprivation hit big time.  My meds kicked in.   We spent two nights at Children's Hospital when Casey spiked a fever (he was fine).  The holidays came, with lots of fun and family time, but were followed by a lot of cold and dark days.  The anxiety of my impending return to work festered.  I decided to quit.  I quit.  I adjusted.  I blogged.

Somewhere in there, Casey started sleeping through the night.  Braden got used to his new sibling.  Spring came.  The weather got nice and the sun stayed out longer.  My husband's workload normalized a bit.  The case I worked on for 3 years at Dickstein settled.  Life went on without me there.  I started getting more used to life at home.  After living for a year on adrenaline, and anticipating the next big shake up, things are settling down.  Normal life is starting to creep in.  In so many ways, it is refreshing.  In other ways, it leaves me feeling empty.

Sleep

As you may know from reading the blog, I have sleep issues.

I have never been the best sleeper.  I've never really been able to nap or sleep in cars or planes.  But give me my bed and eight hours, and that always worked for me.  I had no real complaints.

Since two days after Casey's birth, my sleep has been completely off.  My insomnia was the first sign of my postpartum depression, and what prompted me to go on medication.  Since then, the depression and anxiety have disappeared, and I am back to my happy go-lucky self.  Unfortunately, the sleep issues remain.

I have been on and off sleeping pills for the past eight months.  I'll go a month without using them at all, and then have one bad night, which results in my using the pills again for another six weeks.  Right now I am in an "on" period.  Which generally makes me feel sad and helpless.

Here is a typical night during my "on" period:  Get in bed at 10.  Watch TV until 11.  Turn TV off and begin to toss and turn.  An inner monologue begins, and goes something like this:

The Last Supper

(Disclaimer: So far, a lot of my posts have been about the juxtaposition of a law career and motherhood.  This one is pure, raw motherhood.  So to all the male, childless attorneys out there reading, my apologies in advance if this post just isn't your thing.) 

After 6 and a half months, my son, Casey, is officially weaned.  We have brought out the bottles, and a new era begins.  I am heartbroken.

I never thought I would be the type who would fall in love with breastfeeding.  I've always been a new age hippy wannabe, but I never quite get there.  When I was pregnant, I took a natural birthing class in the hopes of giving birth drug free.  I didn't labor long before I begged (okay, screamed)  for an epidural.  I will only buy organic fruits and vegetables, and I make my own baby food, yet I take my son to McDonalds once a week.  I go on yoga and meditation kicks, but I am probably one of the more high strung people you will meet.

So when it came to breastfeeding, before Braden (my first son) was born I had a similar half hearted dedication.  My goal was to make it to six weeks.  I felt good about this target, as it meant Braden would get all the antibodies and benefits early on, and then it wouldn't be too long before my husband could share in the feeding and nighttime duties.  And anyway, I have low bone density, so I was advised by my doctor to only breastfeed for six months max.  I purchased all the related breastfeeding gear - ointments, pads, pump - but expected to shelf it in relatively short order after my son was born.

And then Braden came.  The labor was long, but otherwise uncomplicated, and the first time I looked at him was the most amazing moment of my life.  It was such an out of body experience - this baby came out of me?!?!?  A real life person?  My husband and I both cried.  And within moments, he was wrapped in a blanket, on my chest, and breastfeeding.  The moment had been so overwhelming that I almost didn't notice I was feeding him.  It was just so natural - just the way it was supposed to be.  Braden was not inside me anymore, but we were still so intertwined and connected.  From that moment, I was hooked.

My New Endeavor

I have been thinking about starting a blog for a long time.  My excuse was always that I just couldn't fit it into my life.  Between long hours at work at a law firm, taking care of my son, and trying to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night, there just wasn't any room for creative endeavors.  And then, when I had my second son and was on maternity leave, there was the obvious excuse of no time for anything other than nursing my infant, trying to quell the jealousy of my two year old, and trying to get at least 4 hours of sleep per night.  Now, both of my kids are sleeping through the night, I am managing to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night with the aid of sleeping pills (a topic for a longer post), and the long hours at a law firm are no more.  After leaving my job and becoming a stay a home mom, my excuses are officially over. 

A bit of background first.  I am your typical overachieving, risk averse law graduate that has followed the path nicely laid out for me by law school career services.  As a student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I spent my first summer interning for a federal district judge.  The second summer I spent being wined and dined at Skadden Arps in Manhattan, making far too much money and consuming way too much alcohol.  After graduation, I embarked on the consummate two month around the world "bar trip" with my fiance (also a Penn Law graduate), in which I spent a large portion of said money from the prior summer at Skadden.  The trip was immediately followed by a mad rush to find an apartment in Manhattan, and start work as a first year associate at Skadden a week later, the last possible start date.  And so began my life as a lawyer at "biglaw," where, back in 2005 at least, associates felt entitled to ridiculously high salaries and bonuses, and gamed the system as best they could to bill only the minimum amount of hours.  I went through the motions, and true to my nature, billed as much as I could and got great feedback from even the most discerning of partners.  My future at Skadden, a firm that was described in a Vault publication as a "honeymoon canceller," looked bright.  But passion for my job, and my life generally?  Completely lacking.