bethysmalls

This is just an update to let you know that we are all still here and only a little worse for wear. San Antinio for 4 days, home for 16 hours, to the beach for 3 overcast days to home again. My head is still spinning a bit.

Flying was good 3/4 flights. Sleeping in a hotel/napping away from home put us in survival mode.

He sure is cute though.

Where do I begin?

I know I’m messing up the details but, as I remember it and I know I’ve mentioned this before, the first 3 months of Bruno’s life were, like, stupid easy. I used the 5 S’s to soothe him and they worked. Sure he got up at night to eat and I was tired but he wasn’t particularly fussy and only ever cried when he was hungry. I don’t think he even really got that bent out of shape when he was wet.

And then, all of a sudden, things got really hard, really quickly. He was no longer soothed by just swaddles and rocking and sucking and shushing. He was more like a Rubik’s cube and to this day, I’ve never solved one of those without cheating.

When we started the sleep training, I was one ball of exhausted anxiety. Anxiety does not work well with exhaustion, as you might imagine. It wasn’t that I couldn’t fall asleep. It wasn’t that I was worried about anything, really. I just COULD NOT hear my child cry. Hearing him would put my body into a systemic paralysis/chill and it felt like every nerve in my body was at the surface being simultaneously shocked and abraded with a cheese grater. And of course “sleep training” is my euphemism for “letting Bruno cry himself to sleep so that we could get some sleep for the love of God.”

Even though things were getting better, a little easier, It was still causing me much stress to think about the possible damage every “mistake” I made might inflict on my precious boy later in life. I went to see my therapist a couple of weeks ago because there were times when I felt like a huge failure and Hoagey was getting frustrated at my nonsensical claims that I was, “doing everything wrong!” I’ll repeat that HOAGEY WAS GETTING FRUSTRATED. Hoagey might be the least frustrate-able human being in these United States so I knew something was not right. I wanted to meet with him mostly to see if I was suffering from Postpartum Depression because some days… Some days were downright terrible. However, the day I went to see Dr. G, I was having a good day. I mean, Bruno is an easy child especially between the hours of 6am and 4pm. It’s the 5 o’clock to 8:30pm that gets a little uncomfortable. And my appointment was during one of the wondrous, OMG-this-baby-is-perfect times of the day and I couldn’t really remember all those bad times I was having, like two days previous. Hormones are weird like that.

So the night after this therapy session that seemed to be pointless, shit. hit. the fan. Bruno wouldn’t take a nap and all signs pointed to a nap being NECESSARY. But he just wouldn’t fall asleep. And he was CAH-RY-ING. SCAH-REAM-ING. And I was in our basement bawling as well. “I can’t do it!” I sobbed, “I screwed it up again!” I wailed.  Hoagey kind of flew off the handle, and I’m not saying I wasn’t completely out of my mind at the moment, I’m just saying it got too much for him to stay at an even keel.

That weekend we started a new routine where after I feed Bruno, he and daddy go for a walk/let me SLEEEP for a couple of hours. And we did it the next weekend, too. And this past weekend was glorious. I said to Hoagey, “I haven’t enjoyed Bruno this much since he was 12 weeks old. ” It was true, too. I don’t know if my hormones have snapped back into order or if the sleep/hours where I could be in my house and not have my senses at attention gave my anxiety the time off it needed but I feel so much better. The Dread I felt most of the time has disappeared. When we put Bruno down at night, I don’t have to leave the house (and sometimes it still takes 20 minutes or so). I don’t even need to wear earplugs!

I need to mention that the realization that I might have been suffering from something came when I read this post from Alpha Mom’s postpartum blog. I was under the impression that PPD was a certain set of symptoms and since I wasn’t unexplicably sad and insomniac, I figured it was just how it felt to be a new mom which was very disappointing. The constant feeling of being trapped and on edge constantly was not what I had envisioned but it was my status every day and I just assumed that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. “How do people do this more than once?!” I’d think to myself. Some days… Some days were terrible.

This past weekend, though, I think I came out of the woods. I feel great and I am enjoying my son immensely.

Look how happy I am! And this was at my in-laws!