The ABC of P - Pregnancy and Parenting

I've been thinking, what if everything that happens in and around pregnancy and parenting could be fit into the ABC. Just 26 characters and what each one stands for, during those 9 months and the rest of your life.

A - ADVICE

This one is number one, obviously because it's A. But, more than that, it's because the second you announce to the world that you are pregnant, the advice starts pouring in. You suddenly are trending on the advice graph, because everyone is talking TO YOU, ABOUT YOU.

Mind it, very rarely will you come across advice that will actually HELP YOU. Mostly, it will just be well-meaning strangers and relatives and friends giving you tid bits about them and their aunty's mumm'y neighbor's uncle's wife's pregnancy which WAS THE SAME, OH MY GOD!

Even the molecules of Hydrogen and Oxygen in your glass of water will have advice for you, JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE PREGNANT AND ARE LOOKING FOR ADVICE!

B - BUMP, BABY, BUM AND BREASTS

Bump - everyone will want to touch it. Ditto, the baby. The other two, not so much. Sorry, breasts, yes. Once you deliver, EVERYONE IN YOUR DELIVERY TEAM will touch them to feel for milk.

The bum? well, It gets REALLY BIG and that's why it gets honorary mention here. And, it takes forever to knock the fat off it. REFER TO U - UNDERWEAR

ALSO, BAMBOOZLED

That's because the A-ADVICE you get is so useless, you feel like you've been bamboozled! Nobody tells you the real thing. Everyone gives anecdotal evidence, but nobody offers any intelligent advice on how to tackle a problem.

Ohhhh! You are going to miss sleep!

Okay, if so, then why don't you tell me ways on how I can GET SOME SLEEP?!

C - CHILD BIRTH

The D-day you've been waiting for is here. And you are shitting bricks. And then you pop out a football from your "down there". Yes, okay, need I say more?

ALSO, CAESAREAN. Considered to be an "easy" option for child birth. Except that, it isn't. The pain lasts for months. And, there's always a weird-shaped lower tummy that hangs over.

D - DADDY

The love of your life now has a new love and you are okay about it. Mush! It's sheer bliss to see daddies holding their babies and smelling their hair and that lush baby smell.

E - EASY

Everyone tells you it's easy. It isn't, okay? It's somewhere in between. Just accept it and move on.

ALSO, ENERGY, OR THE LACK OF IT

Pregnancy can be hard on some women. There's no "glow". There's only a "blow", as in body blow, because everything aches!

F - FAT

This one is for me, not for the fellow mommies who've gone back to shape.

We gave birth. TO A PERSON. It's okay to be fat for a while, at least till you are feeding that person.

ALSO, THE F***, You will say this A LOT! In the initial days, when you are getting over the shock of everything that no one told you about (READ A - ADVICE).

Once your baby turns into a toddler, you will find yourself replacing the F*** with FLUSH, FISH, FREAK, FAN. Anything that starts with 'F', because it's only when the 'F' leaves your tongue, do you realise that you would rather not complete the sentence.

G - GOOF UPS

There will be many. Inside out pants. Backside-front diapers. Inside out Tee shirts, yours, not the baby's. Because the baby was crying and you didn't want to rush out naked to ask Daddy for help.

H - HIPPOPOTAMUS

This is also for me. I feel like one. I will eventually get over it, ONE DAY.

ALSO, HORROR MOVIE

Because, life suddenly feels like one. Parenting is hard work and you don't get any bonus or "good job" cards. You constantly feel lost and scared and are forever questioning yourself.

I - AS IN I, ME, MYSELF

You tend to forget yourself once the baby arrives. And, that's okay. You WILL HAVE TIME once he's 20 years old.

J - JUST LIKE THAT

And, just like that, he will start sleeping through, Or take to potty training. Or start walking/talking/crawling. Parenting is full of beautiful surprises.

K - KICKS

During pregnancy, from the inside. Once they are out, THEY CONTINUE TO KICK YOU! While changing diapers during their infancy stage, just because they life how their legs move when they kick!

And, as a toddler, they will kick just because they like the way you screamed like a wimp when you were kicked.

L - LOVE

The moment you lay your eyes on your baby, that's pure, eternal love. No amount of pee, poo and vomit will ever make you think, "let's go on a break". No. THIS IS IT. Time for the husband to take a back seat!

M - MILK

You will find yourself talking about this till your baby is 6 months old. It will feature in every random conversation you will have.

ALSO, MOM, MOTHER

Because, you will suddenly have so much respect for her. You will feel ashamed and embarrassed for things you may have said to her in your teenage years.

MOM, I AM SO SORRY AND SO THANKFUL. This will play in your head, over and over again.

N - NEVER SAY NEVER

To anything. Because, life comes full circle. You will find yourself sitting in the middle of the day with a pot as your hat, even though all this buffoonery was below your standard.

Kids make destiny bite you in the bum, okay? SO, SMILE AND PRETEND TO FEED THAT POWDER BOTTLE!

ALSO, NO

You will find yourself saying this TWENTY THOUSAND TIMES  A DAY!

NOOOOO! DON'T LICK THE CARPET! NOOOOO! DON'T EAT THAT SHOE! NOOOOO! DON'T PUT YOUR HAND IN YOUR OWN POOP!

O - OH MY GOD

REFER TO F***, as OMG will also be a sound replacement for WTF?!

You will OMG a lot! OMG, THERE'S VOMIT ON MY SHIRT AND I KEPT THINKING WHAT ON EARTH STINKS SO MUCH!

P - PEE PEES

This one is for fellow mommies to little boys. They start touching theirs WAY TOO EARLY! I was hoping the touching wouldn't kick in till teenage years. Sigh. What was I thinking?!

Q - QUESTIONS

Talking toddlers have a way of asking the most inane questions. What do dogs eat? Why is aunty thin and you are fat? Where do babies come from?

'NUFF SAID!

R - REASONS

You will constantly find yourself defending your parenting choices. So, there will be reasons for everything that you do, that others may deem "wrong", because they "NEVER DID IT THIS WAY IN THEIR TIME".

S - SEX, OR THE LACK OF IT

I am NOT commenting on this any further!

T - TODDLER TANTRUMS

Aahh, I end up finding myself in the midst of one every five minutes! They sure are fun!

One of these days, I am definitely pulling my own hair!

U - UNDERWEAR

Big, ugly, scary ones. The ones your great great granny wore for her first night. Because, your B - BUM will achieve gargantuan proportions.

V - VALUE

Everything in life takes a new meaning. Having a baby teaches you so many things, the most of all being, value for yourself, your partner, your marriage, your parents. It makes you a better person.

W - WOW

REFER, OH MY GOD. You will say this a lot. Wow, he's used up all his pants today! Wow, he ate my lunch and threw his behind the sofa!

X - XYLOPHONE

Because NO OTHER WORD THAT MAKES SENSE STARTS WITH X!

You can replace this with X-ray, if you want!

Y - YES

REFER NEVER SAY NEVER. Pants that have projectile vomit on them? SURE, YES, I will clean them.

Try to put him to sleep for the FIFTH TIME in the last 2 hours?! yes, I will do it.

Z - ZOMBIE

NEED I SAY MORE?!?!

Old McDonald had a farm! And on his farm, he had a COW!!!

I am sitting here trying to recall the initial days, but all that comes to mind is the feeding, or sometimes, the lack of it, in my case.

The only other thing(s) that come to mind are the constant peeing, little P's, NOT MINE! The poos, again, HIS.

I also recall being peed IN THE FACE, INTO THE MOUTH!

NOTE TO SELF: KEEP TRAP SHUT WHEN CHANGING THE DUDE'S NAPPY!

And. the sleeplessness. Oh man! I think I had gone into zombie territory!

Those who know me well would know that I am an emotional person when it comes to sleep. Lack of decent sleep makes me go bonkers. I could literally pull my own hair off and cry, I get that cranky, even at this age.

And the breastfeeding was taking its toll on my emotions. The biting was just getting too much. At one point, half my nipple came off, just like that. It was as if it decided, hey, let me see what happens when I hang off this cliff!!!

I was constantly doing a yo-yo between "I am stopping right this moment!", and "Let me feed him ONE LAST TIME!"

Come to think of it, I was sleepless because little P would just not sleep. The combination of lack of sleep and the feeding issues were taking a toll on him.

We were clueless. Breastfed babies typically thrive on mother's milk, but ours was like a one-in-a-million exception.

We had to radically up the formula, yet again, and this time, we started using bottles, because spoon feeding a screaming baby is an art that no one can master. More than 70 per cent of the milk goes waste!

This was a catch 22 situation, yet again. In less than 3 days' time, little P had developed what is known as nipple confusion. In simple terms, he had started preferring the fast pace at which milk was flowing from the bottle nipples, compared to breastfeeding, which required him to put in a lot of hard work!

Oh yeah! Babies are smart! They will, any given day, prefer something that requires them to do less hard work.

I was stumped. I just didn't know what to do. He simply refused to feed, all over again. I finally managed to spend some good monies this time, and bought an electric pump, which is typically far far better than a manual one.

I went online and found out some women who do what is known as "exclusively pumping". That is, they pump breast milk on a schedule that more or less resembles their baby's feeding pattern, and the baby is only fed expressed breast milk. 

This is the hardest thing to do. Imagine the horrors of cleaning and sterilising bottles, add to that the cleaning and sterilising the breast pump. Now, instead of directly feeding the baby, which gets easier as the baby grows, you put a pump to those breasts and sit for a scheduled time.

Here's the beauty: In the initial days, you HAVE TO DO THIS AS OFTEN AS YOUR BABY WOULD FEED! YES, that's right. One has to do this at least 8-10 times a day! And you have to pump once between 1-5am, because that's when you produce the most milk, based on your hormones.

Without going into further details... I did this for ONE WHOLE MONTH. Every day, without a fail, I would start at 7 am, and pump on a 2 hour schedule till 11 in the night. The pumping itself would take 40 minutes, so by the time I would be done, it would be time for the next session!

I would even put an alarm for 3.30 am every night, and when the whole world and my own baby would be fast asleep, I would be up and out on a date with the damn pump going grrr grrr grrr whee whee whee on me!

The funny part was, keeping that expressed milk in the refrigerator was a constant worry! I had to always tell FIL, hey, you better not use that to make your morning cuppa!!!

My pumping had become a joke, and so had I, but not in a bad way. Every one was glad things were going okay. Little P was finally thriving. The formula was slowly being cut out and he was becoming more and more "dependent" on me.

Because I was constantly pumping, most times, I felt like a farm cow who was being milked at all odd hours of the day, and the reason I was being taken care of, was because of the milk I was providing.

My mother dear's sense of humour suddenly knew no bounds. As soon as little P would start crying, she would say, "Hold on! The cow is being milked just for you!"

Some times, she would feed the expressed milk to him, and say, "Here you go! Fresh from the farm, just for you!" I could kiss her RIGHT NOW, I TELLYA!

At times, when I was in the mood myself, I would MOO MOO!! whilst pumping!

Oh yeah! Whoever said bringing up a baby isn't fun, should try his (her??!) hands at pumping!  

Look, mommy! Instead of milk, there's blood coming out!

The last time I checked, it had been 3 HOURS since little P had started feeding. Oh yeah, those cluster feeds, when your little monster can literally feed for hours on end, can break the hardest of human beings.

I know a fellow-mom whose little one once fed for some 14 hours non stop!!!

Me, I was so ecstatic that little P was feeding from me, that 3 hours seemed nothing. My doctor had advised me to lock ourselves in a room, no disturbance, put on some music to ease my anxiety over feeding and just feed feed feed.

So, in true nerd style, the ipod was always at the bedside, the room was always comfortable, there was a water bottle and a straw, LOADS AND LOADS of pillows to support me and little P, and just us.

More importantly, I had three soldiers literally standing on one foot, ready to take orders from a screaming me, every time I wanted something. Mom, MIL and the husband were equally happy that things were finally working for us, and ready to provide me with a helping hand and leg!

There was a flip side to this, though. Our little P, it turned out, was quite a biter!

Only a nursing mother knows how painful it is to be bitten by a baby whilst feeding!

Man! Do no underestimate the power of those gums. Teeth are overrated! A little nip is all it takes for the blood to start oozing out instead of milk!

I sometimes think, maybe it's a good thing that nature provided women with two breasts! I would be retired hurt from one side for days on end. As soon as it would repair, bam! The other side would get seriously nipped, and I would have to suspend feeding from that side for at least 3 days for it to heal completely.

Here's another beautiful thing about breastfeeding. If you rest a injured side for too long, you end up getting either engorged, or with block milk ducts.

And when I say that getting spanked on your bottom is probably a lesser pain any either of these two bit***s, I am right!

Mother of god! The pain, and the shivering and the fever that follow these two beauties, oh wow!!!

This one time, I was feeding from the nipped side, I looked down, and he looked like a little vampire! His mouth was covered in MY BLOOD!

I hadn't realised, but I had seriously "broken a boob", as they say. There was blood gushing out like a waterfall, little P had no idea had he was guzzling on my blood, and his torso was also covered in blood!

The emotional trauma of getting bit was too much for me to handle. This was a recurring thing for me. Every few days, I was heard screaming my lungs out, crying hysterically, rushing to the washroom to see the damage and eventually roam around the house with a smelly Tee-shirt that would reek of milk, because I would leak to the moon and back, during those rest days.

Apart from the biting, things were going okay, I suppose. But, there was a weird part: Little P was refusing to sleep. This was one non-sleeper. He just wouldn't sleep. He would feed for 3 hours, but sleep for 10 minutes, and wake up for another feed.

So, we continued giving him his top-ups here and there, but he kept dropping weight, until one day, we got him weighed, and he had dropped roughly 1.5 kgs. Which is like some 20 kgs in adult weight.

My ego was satisfied that breastfeeding was working, but this wasn't how I wanted it to work. The doubts and the questions were back.

Is garlic better than guilt?

The thing with guilt is: IT'S A BLOODY BITCH!!!

As I see it, guilt is like a giant, enormous and invisible spider on your back. It's huge, but because it is invisible, only you can feel the burden of its weight and everybody else around you wonders why it's bothering you!

For sure as hell, they can't see it, so they don't know what it's like to feel guilty about something.

Today is an apt day to write about guilt, because today, I feel guilty.

Yes, I indeed chomped away on a pizza, but that's not what's killing me on the inside.

I did something awful, but I shall munch on that guilt myself.

Going back to the past...

This guilt was at work then as well. Breastfeeding was turning out to be a nightmare. Nobody at my place understood what I was going through. They probably thought I was selfish for trying again and again to get little P to feed from me, get him all worked up, and then give up and feed him formula!

Might as well have given it to him in the first place, dumbass!!!

And then...

The doorbell rang...

My saviour had arrived!!! And no, no pizza this time!

It was the breast pump I had ordered! Woohoo! Hello, watermelons, whatcha gonna do now, eh?!

So, off I went, on a date with the pump. Now, this breast pump is the UNSEXIEST THING ever invented for those ladies.

Not even the largest, ugliest maternity bra comes close to this ugly monster which goes grrr grrr when you put it on to you! It's a horror show, alright!

Any hoo... This wasn't a workable solution. Firstly, my milk was quickly drying up because nothing can possibly suckle and remove milk from a breast the way a baby can. Do not underestimate the power of a baby's suckle!

Moreover, it would take me ages to get tiny amounts of milk and the whole process was so damn frustrating.

I was losing trust in my own body and its ability to take care of something that it had created. I mean, what good a mother was I, who couldn't feed her own baby.

The pediatrician's words had killed me. I was ready to die. I was ready to do anything.

At times like these, the mother-in-law sure has some ideas up her sleeve.

When I said anything, I meant anything except garlic. I seriously hate those bastards! And guess who knew that...?! ;)

Sure enough, a lovely concoction was prepared. This was no concoction, it was the juice of a million garlic pods crushed to death and fed to me, so I could die. The husband pinched my nose and almost sat on top of me, lest I kick him you-know-where. And the MIL, ah bless her! She poured a GLASS FULL OF GARLIC JUICE down my throat!!!

Frankly speaking, I don't know what worked. My pigheadedness, the stupid effing garlic "concoction" or just God's will, but one day, I randomly decided to pop little P on, and VOILA!!!

Guess what, he happily guzzled away!

Hooray! Just like that, my worries all faded as he fed...

And fed...

And fed...

And fed...

And then some more...

"And why are we feeding the baby poison?!"

Day 4 was one long day and drained me emotionally!

It's like a switch flipped inside little P's head and something went kaboom!!

He just refused to feed. Nothing I did, worked for him. He kept howling like a banshee. It was like watching Tarzan in a horror show, it was that bad.

He was clearly hungry, but would not bother feeding from the breast.

Looking back in hindsight, I smile as I recollect the things I tried in order to get him to feed.

I handed him to mom, and as she held him i dangled "myself" over him so gravity could works it miracle.

But no! Some more hollering!

I put him down on the bed, and bent over him. NADA!

I had read about the wonders of skin to skin, that is stripping baby and yourself down to nothing and just letting him say on top of you like that. Nothing there!

I was getting restless and the folks were wondering if I was mad.

The thing with breastfeeding is, it's very simple and easy to those who don't face problems; else, it's the hardest thing ever for those who do face problems.

And I, of course, fell in the latter category.

Nothing was working, so we all finally gave in, and gave little P a bit of formula, and off he dozed.

Now, again, how breastfeeding works is very simple, a supply and demand thing. The more you feed, the more milk you make.And that's why newborn babies feed like crazy, because they send out signals to your body to make enough milk for them.

I had no idea what to do. I was crying hysterically. I had envisaged a smooth nursing journey, but this was the beginning of a long, long battle.

So, every day, or rather every few hours, I did the unsexy task of hand pumping my own breasts. And I tell you, this is the weirdest thing one can do with those ladies!

I mean, once you start breastfeeding, the idea of breasts being a sexual commodity sounds so lame and ridiculous, that you wonder what the big deal is about them. After all, they are only a baby's natural source of food!

Things went on like this for about 4 odd days or so. I would be knackered trying to win a lost battle, I would get fed up pumping spoonfuls of milk, which would sometimes take me 45 minutes, and little P was happy and content with his formula, something I was beginning to hate from my core.

In the meantime, I had ordered a manual breast pump for myself, because I was getting fed up of pom poming myself every few hours.

We had our immunisation coming up, and decided to carry little P's formula in a bottle, something we hadn't used until that point.

We entered the pediatrician's cabin, and I was greeted with:

"And why are we feeding the baby poison?!"

I was stunned. The bottle and the formula wasn't a choice, it was a compulsion because things were taking time to work out and the baby needed his nutrition.

I had suddenly, in the matter of a second, been turned into a evil mother who feeds her baby "poison".

The battle between breast and formula had just begun!

He's hungry! No, he's wet! Nonono, look, he's pooped!

Day 2 dawned upon us, although I don't think we were in the mental state to figure out if it was dawn or dusk, or for that matter, whether we were even alive!

There was, needless to say, no sleep, whatsoever. I was in horrible pain and couldn't move an inch without silently crying in pain or without the husband's, or mom's help. I couldn't turn sides, let alone get up and walk.

The baby, of course, would let out a piercing cry every couple of minutes, once poo, once pee, sometimes hunger, most times, it was nothing, or at least it seemed like nothing.

I think, at some time, little P would just think, "Hey! They are all blissfully quiet and asleep for FIVE WHOLE MINUTES! Let me see what happens when I scream bloody murder!"

And Voila! He would let out a cry that would make all of us run to find out what was bugging him.

We slowly started getting visitors, much to my dismay. Go on, judge me, I am quite snooty! Baah! I just wanted the baby back inside my womb where no fat old aunties would come and pinch the life out of his cheeks.

Neither did I want "advice" from fellow, yet seasoned, mothers who told me to literally scream and shout at the top of my voice near my sleeping little P, because, you know, babies should be able to sleep even in a noisy room, else they develop "bad habits"!

He was ONE DAY OLD! I didn't care what bad habits were forming. There would be plenty of time to form those and break those, but right now, he's asleep and quiet. That's all that matters!

And then, there were those aunties, who thought, just because of their gender, they were allowed to watch me feed my baby and comment about how "BIG" I was and how the baby was making this noise and that noise.

Hey, aunty! See, that's the door on your right. Now help yourself!"

At first, I was hesitant, but then I thought, what the heck?! Let her stare, she's probably forgotten what boobs look like. I am just going to feed my baby, while you continue to shove your husband out the door, because he's a man and is forbidden to look at other women's breasts, while you can stare all you want, because that doesn't make me uncomfortable in the least!

But the next time you gobble and chomp down that dosa, I will humph and pumph about what a noisy eater you are and how big your plate is!

I had read up so much on breastfeeding. I had watched videos, I had tons and tons of material on me and in my head. But when the ground reality hit, I forgot every damn thing. The emotions were so overwhelming, that nothing made sense.

The fact that I had given birth and this baby was our creation and our responsibility was so poignant, that I was left paralysed and brain dead. Everything was on auto pilot, but I was clueless.

Feeding was becoming increasingly difficult, God knew why. The baby was being given top-ups with the help of a spoon, and little P was slowly getting used to the milk trickling into his mouth at a much faster speed than what his natural source of food could ever give.

New mom emotions are a horrible thing. They give you bad guilt when you need none, But the overpowering motherly instincts ensure that you want to do everything possible to provide love, comfort and nourishment to the little wonder that you help create and carry to term.

Little did I know, the events of those day would lay the foundation of my battle with breastfeeding for many many more weeks to come.

But the pig headed person that you know me to be, I would eventually, and very very slowly, but steadily, win that battle and emerge the winner. Hooray, watermelons!!!