It’s a Girl

When you are pregnant with your first child, people ask lots of questions about morning sickness and birth plans, and make cracks about how you’ll never sleep again once the baby arrives.

You might conclude that pregnancy is arduous, labor and delivery are hell, and babies are cute but you won’t notice because you’ll be far too sleep-deprived.

Well, yes and no. Pregnancy for me had its minor discomforts, but that was all they were. Labor and delivery didn’t exactly happen, given Delphine’s super-breechitude and our scheduled C-section.

And the sleep thing? Well, as a friend commented over a year ago, about her then six-month-old son, “If you had told me last year that I wouldn’t get more than six or seven hours of sleep a night for months and months, I would’ve thought I couldn’t handle it. But you know what? You get used to it.”

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We have a number of friends who are jumping into the new-parent pool this year. And so lately I’ve been giving them a bit of unsolicited advice: When that baby arrives, don’t forget to take care of yourself, too.

Not that we expect all these new mommies to suffer the slings and arrows of way too many unforeseen postpartum complications, like me. A C-section, breastfeeding difficulties, a gallbladder gone haywire, raging gum disease, and a blown-out lower back? Few new moms get to enjoy all these treats in their first year post-partum, as I have. Lucky, lucky me!

But — and this is a big but — most if not all of the women we know who’ve become moms in the past few years have struggled with physical challenges postpartum. And we’re not just talking sleep deprivation.

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We’ve noticed that the off-the-cuff comments we get about Delphine from people who don’t know us well tend to fall into one of two categories: absolute ignorance, or thoughtless rudeness.

Absolute Ignorance, for example, includes the following:

1) We go to a restaurant with our tiny newborn wrapped in a Baby Björn. The waiter notices the baby, looks befuddled for a moment, and then asks, “Dinner for two, plus high chair?” What’s obvious to us (the baby is so small she can’t even lift up her head, much less sit in a high chair) is clearly less so to the (presumably childless) waiter.

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