Now that my children are 4 and 2, I can look back relatively fondly on those days of immediate postpartum; the feeling of absolute overwhelm, the various surprise fluids that were suddenly leaking from my person. But at the time they were a massive shock - why does nobody prepare you for what is about to happen? Is it because we so quickly forget? Blank it out? Here were my top five body-shocker surprises. Possibly not for the mildly squeamish.
Parenting on Female First
At the top spot: the post-partum tum-tum. Yes, that beautiful taut egg-pod of a full-term pregnancy tummy became a sagging, wobbling mass of spongey flesh overnight. Not that I really had an “overnight” after the birth, because I slept for about an hour, but you get the drift. After my catheter had been removed (let’s not go there) and I was prompted to use the bathroom, I got out of bed (rolled onto the floor) to find I was carrying what felt like a sack of potatoes in my belly. A huge sack. Don’t get me wrong; I knew that pregnant bellies didn’t flatten out quickly, but I wasn’t expecting to still look eight months pregnant!
Next in line: blood. For some insane reason I assumed that vaginal bleeding after birth was linked to vaginal births and so when I had a C-section I thought “yesss! No bleeding!” Well. I was wrong on that front! Six thousand mattress-like maternity pads later...
Forceful milk eruptions. OK, I knew that breasts produced milk but what I wasn’t aware of was that nipples could actually squirt milk – proper streams of it – and that they could do so completely unprompted. The first time it happened, I was sitting up in bed and it just streamed out through the air and hit the opposite wall! It’s no wonder, then, that I had been waking up to soaked sheets and duvets if my breast pads had slipped out of place…
Nausea. I thought that I had left nausea behind with the first-and-a-half trimester of pregnancy but no, a couple of days after the birth there it was, back with a vengeance. I was worried I had transmitted some awful hospital bug at first, but soon realised that I was experiencing it only in the first minute or so of a breastfeed, and when I Googled it (good old Doctor Google!) I found out that it was a hormonal thing, the release of oxytocin, linked to milk let-down. Well I never.
Loss of memory.
Loss of memory.
Loss of memory. This is a long-term problem, but thankfully nothing too severe – I don’t think I repeat myself, or anything like that. But I used to have a brilliant memory and now I rely on lists for everything. And post-it notes. I feel as though I’m in that film where the bloke I can’t remember the name of has had something happen to him that I can’t recall and he has to leave a paper trail everywhere to remind himself of who he is and so on. Memento, is it? I must try to remember to find out.
Ruth Crilly’s The Night Feed is available to download from the App Store and Google Play for £3.99.