Having a baby I have found leaves a person with very little time. Things kind of go like this: Wake up to baby crying, change baby, feed baby, try to get baby to fall asleep again, while baby is asleep try to get things done, these things may include: cleaning, eating, sleeping or trying to de-stress. Baby usually wakes up during this time and everything starts again. This is why I boggle at the advice that you get as a new mom.
Sleep while your child is sleeping is something I have often heard. Problem is sleep is not something you can always do when you have other things that need to be done. Things like feeding yourself, doing laundry, washing bottles, washing dishes, trying to get the house looking somewhat presentable, etc. The feeding yourself part seems to be my greatest hurdle. My baby seems to have a inborn sense of when Mommy is trying to feed herself, because almost every time I start putting anything together for consumption is when he begins to fuss or flat out bawl. This has led me to wonder if the baby has some strange desire to keep me from eating. Logically I know this is not the case, but there is a part of me that wonders.
This leads me to my next topic, hysteria. When I was in high school I took a class where we covered Latin roots, prefixes and suffixes. And hyster was one that we discussed. The word hyster has to do with women, which is why hysterectomy refers to the removal of the uterus. It is also part of the word hysteria. This is because hysteria was generally attributed to women, or rather only women were the crazy ones, which is why they were not allowed to vote in ancient Greece and Rome. When I was younger I really wondered about this, women were just fine, there was nothing insane about them. Then I had a child.
Truthfully I was lucky, I went through In Vetro Fertilization (IVF) to get pregnant and during the fertility treatments I did great! No crazed hormonally imbalanced woman going crazy all over everyone. Then I got pregnant and nothing really changed. I was good, even keel, absolutely fine. Then the baby came and suddenly the hormone change happened. I had mood swings, a stress level that was insane, I snapped at my husband, it was terrible. Then I got medicated and things began to calm down. But I began to see why women would be considered insane.
Thankfully in my medicated state I have two sides to me, an emotional side and a rational side. The rational side keeps me chugging along like a normal well adjusted person and the emotional side leaves me in a squirmy pile of goo over my cute baby. But thank goodness for that rational side, otherwise I would probably start to believe certain things that come to my mind. Things like: The baby doesn't want me to eat, or the baby doesn't want me to sleep, or the baby is out to get me, or the baby hates me because he cries half the times he looks at me, etc. My rational side grabs onto those thoughts and says, "Really? That makes no sense at all. The baby has no idea about you eating, the baby just needs something and is communicating the only way he knows how to at this point, by crying." But I can see how someone could easily go off the deep end if they started to believe the crazy thoughts that come into your head when you have just had a baby. And it makes me wonder about what comes next.
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