Hello blogging world, it's been a while. True to form, I had a baby, and now I want to blog again. Apparently this is a pattern. Although, I don't plan on having more babies at this point, so I may have to figure something else out to keep this thing going.
Speaking of, I had a baby! Jude Denman Meador, our second son was born 5 days after his Christmas day due date on December 30. Even though he decided to have a late arrival, he thankfully came quickly, in just 6 hours! It's been a blur of sleepless nights, refluxy days and sweet baby cuddles...eventually I'll get around to sharing his birth story, because it's a good one.
After having our first son, I was a little blindsided by the world of motherhood. Meeting new friends is awkward enough once you're out of college - unless you work together, it can be really difficult to form new relationships in the 'real' world. Once you enter the world of motherhood, it goes to new levels of potential awkwardness. You all of a sudden have this 'thing' (by thing, I mean a child) in common with all of these other woman, many of whom you've barely talked to before or wouldn't, in your previous life, have necessarily been close with. But now you're desperate for someone, anyone who can understand what it is your life is like - how a day full of nothing but poop, laundry, spit up and more laundry can somehow be the most scary, dull, satisfying, horrifying and perfect day of your life, all at once. So you go from 'Hi, I'm Alisha, nice to meet you!' to talking about breasts, lack of sleep, wanting to drink wine at 11 am and even your nether-regions, in the span of oh...about 5 minutes. And then you feel strangely close to this new person, yet at the same time realizing you may have just frightened them away beyond the point of ever recovering.
If you haven't realized it yet, making 'mommy' friends isn't the most natural thing in the world, at least not for me. I've always had a pretty tight-knit group of friends (that has changed with life stages) and while I'm great at small-talk, haven't necessarily wanted - or NEEDED - to have more people in my life. In fact, I've always hated to be someone who needed anything. I'm self-sufficient! I can handle this!
But this motherhood thing changed that.
There are so many emotions, so many things changing, things that even some of your closest friends and your husband can't understand because they haven't been through it. And you realize that you need this community, this group of women who are so vastly different from one another, but have that one 'thing' (again, see: child) in common. After going through postpartum depression last time, I was acutely aware of this need during this pregnancy, and made sure to let friends and other moms know I needed this.
And you know what? It has been beautiful to watch.
From day one, I gave myself the freedom to say what I needed and to ask for help. I politely asked friends to not visit in the hospital, to give our family that initial bonding time. I asked my parents to wait a week to come, again, so we could have that family adjustment. But even during that time, I had some friends who were so intentional about every.day. texting me to see how I was doing. Not just a generic 'how's it going?' but a 'how are you emotionally?' and giving me permission to cry, or vent, or be angry or elated or whatever feelings I had in that crazy blur of after-birth hormones. I can't tell you how much those texts meant.
In the week or so after birth, for lack of a better phrase: shit got crazy. I had the worse case of mastitis in the history of mastitis (or darn close to it), that involved hospital visits and breast imaging and carting a newborn to way too many Dr. visits. It involved taking copious amounts of antibiotics and a baby developing reflux and me having to quit nursing and praying to God I didn't get another infection. We then passed the stomach flu around our family. Hooray. And while I would have loved to have NOT gone through all of that, I think one of the big reasons I did was to see community at work, in a real, tangible, no-frills way.
Neighbors who literally walked in our house and said 'Come on Graham!' and would take our oldest for 3 hours to play. Parents who understood if I needed time with just the baby, or by myself, and would send me upstairs to rest, read or binge-watch Netflix while nursing. A friend/amazing doula who constantly sent encouragement and comic relief in those first hard days. One who had experienced the hell that is mastitis and immediately brought every remedy they had and checked in daily. Friends who would pick up Graham from preschool and keep him for the afternoon. MOPS leaders who randomly dropped off coffee at my door, or small gifts for Graham. THE MEALS from so many people! Someone who took off work while I was sick and made soup, bought diapers that we were almost out of, and took our dirty laundry, literally. Another who literally jumped in her car at 9 pm and brought me her own son's medicine when I couldn't get Jude's Zantac prescription filled, and hugged me while I cried. (what? I mean, I don't share prescription drugs.)
And you know what facilitated a lot of this? Those awkward conversations. Going from zero to 60 in relationship terms. Boobs. Seriously, I had multiple people offer me breast pumps, ask specifically about the mastitis and how that was (which is literally saying, hey! how's your boob doing?), actually had a friend's husband deliver one pump while I was in the middle of nursing, and even had some friends' husbands ask if 'everything' was healing ok. But this time, it wasn't awkward, or weird, or clumsy. It was just beautiful, and I'm so thankful that I got out of my own way and, for once, was the needy one. Because being the needy one allowed so many wonderful people into my life. That, and the boobs.
