my rolls of the dice
Some time before giving birth I read a tweet that said something like: there are ~10 axes of pregnancy/childbirth/parenting that range from hellish to very easy. Most parents will roll unlucky on a few and be fine on everything else, but childless people see the horror stories and think it’s hellish on all ten.
Here’s expectation/reality for me on the axes I’ve now experienced, on a -10 to 10 (hellish to delightful) scale:
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Morning sickness: I get nauseous easily so I expected the worse, but my first trimester nausea was barely above baseline. Expected -5, got -1.
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Gestational diabetes: Wasn’t even on my radar. I spent a lot of time and emotional energy figuring out what to eat, when, and measuring the consequences afterwards. Expected 0, got -4.
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Pubic symphysis dysfunction: Also wasn’t on my radar. Turns out your joints get weird in pregnancy and you can injure yourself if you push yourself the normal-feeling amount doing yoga for the first time in months. All asymmetric load on my pelvis hurt. I largely stopped going on walks, which contributed to my poor athletic performance during my labor. Expected 0, got -6.
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Third trimester: My mood and energy were both astonishingly good (maybe 95th percentile by pre-pregnancy standards). It was the best trimester for me, even with the physical health issues. Expected -2, got 6.
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Childbirth: I expected this to be hard but not terrible with an epidural, but it was in fact terrible. Expected -5, got -8.
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Physical changes: Pre-pregnancy I reliably got upset when I went 4 pounds above my stable weight. I’d notice things felt bad when I walked or sat, check my weight, and go, yup, I went above the Bad Number. The Bad Number was also the point where I’d start looking bad to myself. I was steeled for pregnancy to set off both kinds of weight related unhappiness, but I gained 30 pounds and found that I did not care at all. Somehow I effortlessly accepted that the way I look and the way my body ‘drove’ was permanently worse. No attempt to hack myself into liking my body above 134 pounds had worked before, so that was surprising. Also surprising was that I effortlessly shed most of the additional weight after birth and looked basically the same as before. Expected -5, got 3.
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The baby herself: the baby I know who is most closely related to me is very colicky, and relatives say she reminds them of me when I was a baby. But the postpartum care worker who took care of my baby says that she’s pretty easy, and even without a wide basis of comparison I concur. Expected -7, got -1.
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Bonding: I was prepared for the worst. I don’t like babies, fluids, or loud noises. I dreamed of a day infant care would be automated, because it was degrading to take up cycles of something so sophisticated as the human intellect. Also, I am accustomed to not having “the standard emotion” around weddings, funerals, goodbyes, large celebrations, and I expected not to have the standard emotion about babies either. It would be a slog until my child was unambiguously sapient – then we could start having a loving relationship.
But huh. No. I had the standard emotion. I adored her within a week. I don’t find infant care degrading. I’m not impatient for her to grow up – it’s actually nice to spend time with the entity she is now. Expected -7, got 7.
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Breastfeeding: I expected this to be easy because I wasn’t going to breastfeed. I wasn’t upset when I failed at it. (It’s… actually… hard? At least for me.) Then my husband and I belatedly had a long debate about whether the “minor but nontrivial” benefits were worth it. As a compromise I agreed to pump breast milk for the first month, and stop after that if we hadn’t gotten breastfeeding working by then. (We got the first successful feeding in today; we’ll see how it goes.) Pumping breast milk was like its own separate postpartum illness. It slightly hurts and it wrecks my sleep. Expected 3, got -5.
If we want to be cavemen and just sum these up to determine that things were a third as bad as I expected:
- Total expected negative points: -28 (average -3.1 per axis)
- Total actual negative points: -9 (average -1 per axis)
baby vs cat
I’ve always felt interest and empathy for nonhuman animals that I didn’t feel for humans. When I got into metta meditation in my twenties (because I thought it would be good for me, not because I enjoyed it), I most often used my household’s cat as an entrypoint.
I wondered, how could I possibly love a baby – which is uglier, more inconvenient, and seems to have less of a personality than an adult cat – than the cat? Will I love the baby just as much? Will I love cats less? (I read accounts of pet owners who came home with a baby and realized their love for the pet – or in some really distressing cases, their preexisting toddler – had vanished.)
As it turns out, the total amount of love stayed the same, but got redistributed. I now love the cat about 30% as much as I used to, and I love the baby 70% as much as I used to love the cat. It is weird to type this out. It’s clearly not true in a love-as-investment frame because I’m far more invested in the baby than I was in the cat.
But it is true if you measure love by “delight when I walk into the room”. My heart used to leap a bit when I walked into the room and saw the cat. I felt an immediate jolt of appreciation, warmth, delight, care. Now, I’m not that delighted to walk into the room and see the baby or the cat.
working
Like many people who don’t get a lot done, I’m obsessed with productivity. My peak life experiences so far largely came from working on projects (writing, painting, and hobby coding). I was afraid to lose this. My yield was already bad – I spend much more time trying to get into the zone than I spend in the zone. Having children could only drag it down further. How could I give this up?
25 days in, my preliminary comments on this are: Yes, I am less productive. I expect coding will take the hardest hit, painting the least. (The longer the whole of a project takes to mentally page back in, the more it will suffer from coexisting with childcare. I find that code takes a while to page back in, but the working context of a normal painting can be taken in at a glance.) This sucks. However:
It turns out I had an auxiliary goal with respect to ‘productivity’ that I wasn’t consciously aware of. My primary goal is to maximize time in the zone. But I also want to minimize time trying to get into the zone, because this way of spending time is miserable.
As I dove back towards my projects in between laundry, dishes, pumping breast milk, and tedious postpartum health management tasks, I noticed: although I predictably spent less time in the zone, I also spent much less time in the trying-to-get-in-the zone zone. I now always have a more compelling use of my time than trying to get into the zone. And when I sit down with a 2 hour free block to make progress on a chosen project, I know I can’t waste it. So I tend not to dither.
I didn’t know what a quality of life improvement this would be until it happened. It sucks to lose total output, but my morale is good.
ocdish thoughts
I spend several minutes a day thinking fearfully about stepping on the baby by accident. I’m a moderately anxious person, and I’m used to anxiety taking me from point to point in a broad cloud of related thoughts. In contrast, the anxiety about stepping on her by accident – usually the mental scene is that she’s on the mattress, I stand up to get out of bed, and step on her on my way to the floor – puts me in a tight mental orbit around that imagined scene. It’s a novel way to feel bad.
I should probably get a bed frame.
unfortunately, nesting instincts
I get so annoyed at the universe when I have classically gendered conflicts. Unfortunately I now see a long future of gendered conflict stretch out in front of me – my husband is about as defensive of his free time as he ever has been, whereas I’ve suddenly found it natural to take as much childcare as I can (which, at the moment, is not a lot). Uh oh.
I’m also, annoying, cleaner. I find myself absently tidying up as I move throughout the house. One load of laundry turns into two – “as long as I’m running it…”; other people’s plates past me would have left for them to eventually get to, I put in the dishwasher.
Previously, the adults in my household were all a similar amount of slobby, and we could live in harmony. As I turn into someone who wants the kitchen counters reliably bare and clean, I will destroy that harmony. Gloom.
love my little baby
Within a week, I found myself saying things like “I love my little baby” and “I love you, little baby”. Bizarre! I didn’t know what it felt like to have a baby be a valid target for the emotion of love. Normally love affixes itself to emotion, reciprocity, intellect.
Even more bizarre: the first merely feels warm to say, but the second feels serious; I tear up a little when I vocalize it.
is it cultural to care about your child’s perspective?
I’ve been talking to my sister more since having a baby. She’s twelve years older than I am, and went to boarding school and then college in the United States, so I mostly saw her during holidays. I got a little emotional on one phone call – I said, “When I was a kid, you were the only person who really listened to me.” She replied, “I know.”
I’ve heard people say they felt better about their parents once they had children themselves. I’ve experienced a bit of this and expect more in the future. Right now though, I actually feel more judgmental. I can’t imagine so regularly dismissing my child’s interests and point of view. To love her is to love her as a person in herself, and therefore to be interested in those things.
Based on growing up in Korea and talking to other Asian Americans, I have the impression that, in that culture, parents by default did not love their children in that way. In the interested-in-them-as-a-person way. How is this possible? Is interest in (and respect for) your child’s point of view a Western individualist thing? Works like Shostak’s Nisa or Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood seem to indicate so. My childhood indicates so.
But it doesn’t feel like it from the inside. The curiosity about what she’ll want and think seems to spring from a deep, primitive, “pre-cultural” part of me.
Could it really be cultural to be interested in your child as a person? What fraction of hunter gatherer parents looked into their baby’s face and thought, “I wonder what you’re going to think about things, when you can think – I want to hear all about it?” Does it usually require other people having that thought for it to occur to you to have that thought? That’s – that’s crazy!
But I don’t know, check back in a decade. Maybe it’s just too much work to be interested in someone who’s different from you, and kind of dumb, and a little insane.