Babylune

The First Phase of New Motherhood

by kate baggott on January 11th, 2006

My name is Kate Baggott and I’d like to welcome you to http://www.babylune.com: the first phase of new motherhood, adventures in post partum recovery.

On December 17th 2005, I became a mother for the second time. I now have what my people call “a millionaire’s family” and what many Chinese cultures call “double happiness.” Yes, I have a boy, a girl and more happiness than I deserve. While I am still constantly broke, like a millionaire I do now have everything I could possibly want.

But this site is not about my children. This blog is about me, and other new mothers, who are recovering and rebuilding after giving birth.

And what an event birth is to recover from. Here are all the gory details from my own experience. I hope you’ll choose to share your own.

Since my first child was a little giant at 4500g (almost 10 pounds) and local folklore says that subsequent children are ever larger than the first, little Mary Christina was induced one evening with a cocktail composed of mineral oil, schnapps, whipping cream and apricot nectar. I drank the cocktail in three hourly doses. The first was followed by a brisk 20 minute walk, the second by a warm bath and, after the third dose, I settled in for the night under the careful supervision of my midwife. Just before 3 a.m., my water broke. My midwife monitored the baby’s heart rate, pushed out the remaining amniotic fluid, and led the way to the hospital. My husband followed her car carefully with only a few criticisms of the route she had chosen.

Labor and birth was a natural affair so short and intense that the pain drove me out of my body for a few minutes. After just a few hours of contractions, the baby’s head reached the infamous “ring of fire” and any consciousness I had was hovering in a corner of the room watching myself give birth, listening to my own screams and humming along to Johnny Cash singing “I fell in to a burning ring of fire.”

I’d planned to go home four hours after birth to recover in my own bed, but I’d lost so much blood my midwife thought I should stay under supervision for at least twelve hours. During that time, my little girl had some breathing difficulties due to mucous. Usually the trip through the birth canal squeezes mucous out of baby’s lungs, but this birth was so quick that there wasn’t time for that to happen and my daughter suffered this side effect more common in a baby delivered by Caesarian section. On the plus side, because she hadn’t spent hours being squeezed through the birth canal she didn’t have a cone head either.

With the baby away receiving oxygen, I went to the bathroom and realized I’d forgotten just how painful urination can be for the first week after giving birth. I remember burning and immediately asking the nurse for a water bottle to squirt onto my perineum and dilute the pee when I passed out. I am not sure if I fainted due to the pain of urination or from blood loss, but it was decided that the baby and I would spend the weekend in hospital.

It was just the first of our two unplanned hospital stays. We spent Christmas weekend in the local children’s clinic where the baby was treated for jaundice. Beside each little cot in the room for about 8 sick newborns was a hard chair for parents to hold vigil. Not the best of conditions for mother with a healing episiotomy. Since my milk supply wasn’t really established, I stayed with Mary at night so that I could nurse. Like the out of town parents and the other nursing mothers, I was given a portable bed in the attic seminar room. It reminded me of the worse of the international youth hostels I’d stayed in as a traveling student, except that it was slightly more uncomfortable as the bathrooms were in the basement instead of just down the hall. Pressure from sitting and the emotional stress of a sick child brought headaches, an exhaustion even more intense than normal new mother exhaustion and guilt about neglecting my son while I stayed with his sister.

The only thing that got me through those terrible nights was the knowledge that in a hospital full of seriously ill children, my baby was just a little bit sick. On Christmas Eve I thanked God for the problems we had instead of the problems we could have had instead.

I couldn’t help remembering the children’s English lesson I’d given when my older son was 8 days old. He slept in the garden while his father chatted with the parents and I taught a group of German school kids to speak English with my own Canadian accent. This time, there’d be no such event. Eight days after giving birth, I was a physical and emotional wreck.

Almost four weeks after giving birth, I can tell you that I feel a lot better. I had a lot of help and I got a lot of good advice. Still, there is a long way to go before I am completely recovered and rebuilt.

I hope, using this site as a meeting place, as an information exchange and as a source of shared inspiration, we can get the rest of the way together.

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