Newborn Fog
Ransom looked like his daddy, and had a full head of hair, and the second I heard him cry I felt relief, and what was that? Joy? Pfff. I don’t feel that.
The hospital stay was a blur of doctors and nurses and syringe feeding sessions and pumping - because as “natural” as breastfeeding is, its also f*cking hard, and we had some significant complications right off the bat. Our closest friends in Colorado came to see us in the hospital, and my mom flew into town and was there by the next day. We stayed the two full days mostly for lactation help. The Viking drove the slowest and most carefully I’d ever seen him drive when we took our baby home.
The newborn phase is a fog. You have no sense of time, the sun rises, the sun sets, the baby eats every 2 hours. Repeat. Family and friends invite themselves over to your house, and they coo over the baby and (hopefully) leave food when they go, and you survive somehow.
You spend a lot of time staring at this little potato in your lap, and for some reason, literally everything they do is adorable. Also, they don’t actually do anything other than randomly move involuntarily. They become your whole world overnight.
Photo by @thelonelyplaces
When I say the newborn stage is a fog, I mean it’s a sleep deprived, emotionally charged, feeding and diapering swamp you get completely lost in. You stumble around blindly wondering how you got here, and who the hell you are now. You are experiencing hormonal withdrawals because your body found out you weren’t pregnant anymore and cut you off cold turkey. In the place of the pregnancy hormones, come breastfeeding hormones and so. much. milk. You constantly wonder if you are doing it right, and doctors appointments feel like “are you a good mother” tests. You cry a lot.
When I say the newborn stage is a fog, I mean it’s the dense dark grey kind, that goes on for miles. The kind your headlights can’t pierce. The kind where you think to yourself “I could drive off a cliff right now and never see it coming.”
And yet, the fog lifts eventually. Not all at once. But slowly. It grows thinner and thinner until one day you realized that the sun is shining again, and everything is okay.
The newborn stage taught me the significance of the phrase “Your mercies are new every morning.” No matter how difficult the night had been, no mater how many times I had been up with Ransom, or changed a poopy diaper or rocked him back to sleep. No matter how frustrated with him I got, when the sun came up everything seemed okay again. Everyday my hope was reborn with the coming of the sun.
The photo for this post was shot by my cousin @bobbsmcgobbs using a Mamiya 7 and medium format color film.
