The Horrors of New Motherhood, Part Deux

So awhile ago I posted part of this great letter I'd gotten eight years ago when Primera came along, and I was missing the really good page, which just turned up when we were harrowing the pile of papers on the den floor. Anyway. What I can't get over is that all those years later she remembered so precisely what it was like, when I can barely remember. I do remember staying up all night holding her in my arms because I was afraid to move and wake her.

She wrote:

I'd mercifully forgotten how awful it was in the beginning. The first...was the most awful.

Before he was born I was blissfully unconcerned because I wanted a baby--lots of babies--and it wasn't real anyway....

The birth and the hospital were exciting, and I did like him, even though he looked like my father-in-law.

It was when I left the hospital that things turned. The morning I left a nurse helped me dress him in the clothes [my husband] had brought--and the receiving blanket.

I was pushed down a long marble hall in a wheel chair. It was all fine till I got outside.

I knew I had no business at all being left in charge of a human being, however small.

I knew that mothers all over the world had always taken babies home and knew somehow how to do everything properly.

But I knew very well I was not like them. I never did know precisely what was wrong with me--but I knew I was not like them--not that I ever felt inferior.--not exactly.

Perhaps on my planet I'm great!

I was clever at fooling people--teachers-friends--but I suspected I had gone too far when I fooled the hospital personnel into letting me take this baby home.

[My husband] was no help at all--except that I needed him there. I needed any person there.

The only thing I could do was nurse, and nurse I did. All the time! There was no day or night or up & down.

There were moments when I looked at him and wondered at him. But most of the time I was physically and emotionally exhausted.

He never seemed content. Even when he finally finally slept--I'd wake him to be sure he was breathing--that I hadn't (being me) inadvertently killed him.

I think torturers thought up things like this. --Modern torturers who tired of breaking things and cutting things off....