Colin was born October 13, 2004 at 1:54pm.
As of this moment, I have been a mommy for 271 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes.
Approximate time that it took for all illusions of effortless mommyhood to vanish into thin air...5 minutes. (It would have been less, but I was still a little groggy from the c-section anesthetic.)
The very first time I put Colin to my breast I knew that no matter how many books you read, no matter how many hours you spend voraciously scarfing up every bit of pregnany and parenting information on the world wide web, no matter how much advice you get from other mothers, nothing can prepare you for the awesomely hard job of being a mother yourself. For you see, that very first time that I put Colin to my breast it was a miserable failure. As were the second, third, fourth, tenth, eighty-second, two-hundred third, four hund...well you get the point. No matter what I did, no matter what the lactation consultants did, he just would not latch on. That's my boy...stubborn just like his mamma. In fact, he's so stubborn that for awhile he wouldn't even eat at all so the nurses had to tube feed him all through his very first night on earth.
The next morning he still wasn't eating super well, so the doctors ordered absolutely no breastfeeding for 24 hours...formula only so they could monitor exactly how much he was eating. (Looking back I should have faught this harder, but I was a brand spankin' new mom & didn't know enough other than to follow doctor's orders.)
I can't say that I blame him for the hunger strike when I think back on it, though. I certianly wouldn't be overjoyed if someone cut open my home and took me from it against my will. Especially when the place I left my home for was about as far polar opposite to what I was used to as you can get. Somewhere during that 1st full day, though, he decided that his hunger strike was over and began eating like a champ...from a bottle only. He didn't want to have anything to do with breastfeeding. Mommy failure #1.
Mommy failure #2 happened shortly thereafter. The hospital supplied us with formula during our stay there. They didn't ask us what kind we wanted, they just brought us Similac Advance so that's what I fed Colin. That formula made him super gassy & gave him bad tummy aches. It wasn't until after we were home from the hospital & after two sleepless nights of baby up screaming with tummy ache that I finally figured out that he was having trouble digesting the proteins in the milk based formula and tried a soy formula. Holy cow...I thought I had a different kid. No more tummy aches. Bad mommy for not figuring it out sooner.
Somewhere around Colin's second week of life I lost count of all my mommy failures. Most days it seemed my failures happened so fast that I needed a calculator just to keep up with them.
I once heard somewhere that if women knew the whole truth about motherhood before having children, no one would willingly repopulate the planet. Which is probably true. BUT...having been a mother myself for exactly 272 days, 35 minutes I can say that they pay-off for enduring all the pain, guilt, heartache, worring, and so on and so forth is far sweeter than I could ever have imagined. The way Colin's face lights up when I come home from work everyday makes me completely forget every bit of mommyhood's trials & tribulations. In that very moment, I am super mom & all is right in the world.
Then of course it's back to reality & mommy failure #9,873, but like I said before I'm not counting.
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