09 May

time dilation

One of the techniques we were taught in the Hypnobirth classes was Time Dilation. This is where, once Dave had put me in a state of deep relaxation, he would count out the time in our practice contractions and tell me that say 5 seconds had passed when it had really been fifteen. The idea was that he could mess with my concept of time so that eventually hours of labour could pass and I’d only think I’d been going for an hour or so.

It sounded really intriguing (and such a good idea) but we never did get around to trying it. I didn’t think it’d really work on me anyway, I’m very hard to surprise so as soon as he started counting out time I was bound to get suspicious. But I am definitely feeling the effects now. Whole days go by and I barely notice. In the morning I’ll get up and think today – today! – I will finally get around to doing some laundry and maybe organise dinner and the next thing it’s dark and Dave’s coming home and what can I remember doing? Feeding the baby. I don’t understand it. I don’t feed her constantly, sometimes she sleeps and sometimes I even get to put her down (she likes to be held, thank goodness for our baby sling), and yet where does the rest of the time go?

I’ve got a form here to register her with Medicare. I’ve been working on filling it in since we got home. It’s only got three sides, but it’s still not done. And don’t even think about doing the accounts, oh my lovely accounts and my spreadsheets, how I miss you!

So anyway. Bianca is now 5 weeks old and we are getting there slowly, which is more than I thought I’d manage. In the second week, when we got home from the hospital, I was completely overwhelmed and frazzled and I didn’t think I’d last. She cried in the evenings and we didn’t know why, so we looked it up in our baby books and every single one said: Babies cry in the evenings, sometimes for hours! No one knows why! And it gets worse until six weeks! And Dave said, So we only need to get to six weeks and it’ll get better. And I said, six weeks? Six weeks? We will NEVER get to six weeks! That is three times her lifetime so far, I cannot imagine it, can’t we go back to hospital? It was easy there, especially in the first day or two, when she hadn’t really woken up yet and I was still on morphine. Please, let me go back or at least give me the drugs again, that was some good stuff. But here we are at five weeks, and all of our friends have said yes, it gets easier soon, except for that one who claims her baby didn’t really get started until 6 weeks and cried nonstop until she was three months old.

But I’m not listening to her.

Truth be told, she’s a fairly easy baby. She feeds well, she sleeps well at night, and she’s only had a handful of days where she’s screamed for hours and can’t be stopped. A lot of the time I feel slightly competent. Her only real problem is she is fairly gassy and when her belly hurts, she cries. And sometimes it hurts a lot. My problem is that I don’t deal well with her crying. I get anxious and I get frustrated and then I cry as well. The next day after an episode, I’m anxious all the time, every little squeak makes me tense and terrified that she’s going to start up again. And of course I’m still generally overwhelmed and feel I have no idea what I’m doing and will screw it all up. But you know, we’ll get there. It’s easy for me to say that right now because she’s not crying at the moment, but we will. Over here we get assigned a Maternal and Child Health Nurse who you see every couple of weeks for her to check the baby, and ours is wonderful. She is kind and patient and gives me lots of suggestions for coping with things. I feel like I can open up to her, which is a big thing for me. I can tell her the truth about how I feel sometimes instead of hiding it behind my usual public mask, and she helps. They keep a very close watch for signs of postnatal depression, and I am probably borderline at the moment, but only when Bianca is crying. The rest of the time I feel mostly okay, apart from the whole not having any time to pick up after myself thing, and who is this male person who lives with me again?

So, we’ll get there. I need to work on not having expectations for the day, and to relax, and to open up more to my friends to get a support network going. I’ve generally been getting visitors a couple of times a week but I need to send out some invites to people to come over and hold the baby while I fold washing or even take myself off to the study to write, so I have some feeling of achievement and time to myself. It helps that a lot of my friends here have babies and they’ve all been saying yes, we understand, call us, use us. So I need to.

And I need to stop, in the moments when she is happy or asleep, and just look at her and see how beautiful she is and remember how much I love her. Here she is on day 2, back when she slept all the time and all I had to do was take my morphine and feed her occasionally:

See how pointy her head is? Like an easter egg.

And here she is at about three weeks old. Yep, I adore her.

Now she's round like a coconut