So in any other circumstance, after going through the equivalent of childbirth, you’d be ordered in to at least 6 weeks bed rest, feet up, no chores, you get the gist, yet in this case you are well and truly thrown in at the deep end.
And deep it is. Shortly after delivery, I was wheeled upstairs and thank god and all things holy, had the great luck of being offered a room instead of a bay bed so could opt for Max to stay with me. It was such a good job he did or I honestly wander if I’d have survived the night! So, in retrospect somewhat naively, I hopped into bed, popped my new beloved baby into her cot after a 30 minute breastfeed, tucked her in, gave Max a fleeting kiss and dewy eyed smile to acknowledge the fact we’d actually done it, and settled down to sleep, smug in the knowledge Esme had a clean nappy, been fed, burped, so therefore would sleep for the prescribed 3 hrs until I would tenderly wake her for her next feed, and so on and so forth.. happy days..or not.
Five seconds later, Esme cried. Oh well, I thought, smiling to myself, she is as new to this as I and probably needs that extra cuddle…4 hrs of rocking, feeding, winding, rocking and crying later, I finally resigned myself to pressing the precious bell that would summon the kind and experienced midwife who would gently waft in to my room and take control and issue calm assurance that all was well with the world and tell me exactly what to do and leave me and babe in a blissful sleep to jointly awake in the dawn of her first proper day on this earth…Ooohh, not quite the case! Instead some formal matron type anarchist marched in and asked me exactly what did I expect? My new little ray of loveliness was vulnerable and exposed and how dare I assume she would want to rest her head in a vacuous cot when she should be snuggled with me, skin to skin for at least the next 12 hours, until she had come to terms with the big, bad, exposed world, that I had just forced her in to. So despite my 25 yrs on this earth, strong will and 4 yrs nursing experience, I trembled under the fierce ones advice and sat, uncomfortably propped against hospital pillows for the next 6 hours, silently weeping, listening to Max’s relaxed snoring and Esme’s newborn curious snuffling against my breast, desperately waiting for morning and the hope that the new day would bring the contented new mum, new baby bubble that I’d been so eagerly anticipating for the last 9 months…
Back at home, I had expected to have a few days to settle in to our new roles in the world, just us 3 and maybe my and Max’s Mum who would hopefully come and regularly offer pearls of wisdom and useful tips on what the hell we should be doing…But then on came the visitors. So I wander, what is it that screams, ‘please come uninvited, in droves, at any hour, for however long’, to the everyone that knows you, and I mean everyone, not just your nearest and dearest, but the local lollypop man and that bloke down the road. And they all bring with them their amazing and practical advice..’leave them to cry’, ‘don’t leave them to cry’, ‘get that baby on a bottle’, ‘breast is best’, ‘you should sleep when baby sleeps’, ‘oh, while you’re up, I could murder another cuppa and a bacon butty if it’s not trouble’….its relentless. For 3 days Esme didn’t sleep unless being held by myself or Max, then one blissful night, she happened to doze off on our bed with us cupped around her and stayed asleep for 3hrs, as did we. It was amazing and we both felt brand new! The next day when I dared to mention this to Mother-in-law, she was furious with us and basically told us we were damn lucky that one of us hadn’t smothered little Esme to death by rolling on her. Unfortunately for said Mother-in-law, her caustic advice has unwittingly come on dreadful day 3, so I cried none stop for the next 20 hrs and Max locked our door to all further visits.
A couple of weeks later, the visits had eased off, the excited interest of all our friends and family had been lost and Max had returned to work. Suddenly it was just me and Esme, winging it together, a day at a time…
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It's a mums life. 