BABY AMNESIA

By Melissa Coleman

As a new member of the esteemed club of motherhood, there is a secret I must share with you before I forget:

Many of us in this club are prey to a vast but little mentioned side effect called baby amnesia. We may utter statements like "the bliss of motherhood" or say how easy our babies are, but that is because we are suffering from baby amnesia. How else would anyone who has undergone the things I have recently suffered ever want to have another child?

Baby amnesia is the secret to the survival of the human race, because if those of us in the club were to tell those who want to get into the club about these uncomfortable truths, there would be no more long waiting lists. Human population would plummet. Luckily you, too, will forget most of what I am about to say.

Here are some of the things we forget:

1) Pregnancy and birth

On top of the obvious uncomforts of gaining what feels like a 40-pound beer belly, suffering from breakouts and having to get up multiple times at night to pee, you contract hemorrhoids from all that weight pushing on your colon and then you get a stomach flu. Yes, it's as uncomfortable as it sounds.

Just when you think you can't stand another trip to the bathroom, your water breaks. However, it is a month early and the babies didn’t have time to get into the proper position for labor so you must have a c-section.

Some people say a c-section is easier than a natural birth, but there’s really nothing too simple about having your belly cut open and your plumbing spread out on a table, including your uterus, from which the babies are extracted, and then having it all shoved back in there and stapled up. It is major surgery, plus you don’t get the feel-good endorphins that come with the baby passing through the birth canal.

2) Nursing

After the relief of finding your babies are healthy and complete with all their fingers and toes, you must keep yourself from falling into much-needed sleep and try to get the babies to nurse. Now, this is not initially the bucolic image you pictured of mother and child at breast, unicorns frolicking in the background. It can be very difficult, especially when you have staples in your belly that hurt every time you move and you can’t take strong pain drugs because they will pass through the milk to the baby.

If you are really lucky, your boobs get so full of milk they look like Dolly Parton's, but you don’t have all of the fun she seems to have, instead your boobs feel like they are being stabbed with hot knives when the babies nurse, which you must do to get the excess milk out. Then maybe you can sleep.

3) Sleep deprivation

There is a reason why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture: it makes you disoriented and likely to say anything. Especially really mean things to your spouse that you can’t believe you actually said. It doesn’t help that all manner of hormones are ragging through your Michelin Man of a body as well.

4) Your body

Not only do you still have a belly almost as big as before the babies came out, but your whole body is bloated with the fluids pumped into you from surgery so that your legs and feet look like sausages and your face is as round as a moon and eyes are swollen. When you try and pee out the fluid, the toilet is filled instead with blood. Nothing is coming out of the back end just yet (luckily for your hemorrhoids), but that further adds to your bloated feeling. This is all especially timely since every person of importance in your life is coming to visit you and the babies. It's always fun to look your worst when you have visitors.

5) Visitors

Even under normal circumstances, having family stay for extended periods of time can be taxing. Now they've come in droves to help with the new babies and you must orchestrate the visits of a mother and father who don't speak to each other and the rest of the six grandparents that have accumulated over the years. Such tender diplomatic skills are not at the top of your toolbox at the moment since those raging hormones are making you want to tell them all to shove off. Somehow you luckily restrain the impulse out of desperate need for help holding babies that won’t stop crying.

5) Crying

Yes, other people's crying babies can be mildly annoying when they are on the plane next to you or in a movie theater. But when it's your own baby, the cry takes on an urgency that fills your entire being with a frenzied panic that has one goal, to make the crying stop. When the crying doesn't stop, the only logical alternative seems to be to take a gun and blow your own head off, thus ending your misery. Another reason for baby amnesia is to make you forget these feelings as quickly as the crying stops, so you don’t go around saying things like this.

6) Baby blues

If you tell people any of the things I'm telling you, they will give each other furtive looks and talk amongst themselves in whispers that cease when you enter the room. They buy you Brooke Shield's book, "Down Came the Rains," about her post-partum depression.

Your husband calls from work and asks to speak to your mother. "About what?" "Oh, nothing." And when you listen on the other line, he's saying in that worried tone, "How's she doing today, better?"  You know he’s not talking about the babies and you want to scream into the phone, "I'll be better when I blow my head off, you butthole!"

In your delusion you think this is not because you have postpartum depression, though 99 percent of women get some form of the baby blues, but because you have been told that motherhood is a miracle while instead it feels like hell.

Luckily for everyone, you are forgetting all this as quickly as it falls from your lips. Even as you hear yourself speak, you're thinking, 'Oh stop, you are exaggerating.' Pretty soon all you can talk about is how amazing your babies are.

"Why didn't you tell me how hard it is?" I accused a pregnant friend and mother of two, back before I had forgotten.

"I did," she said, "but you couldn't hear it until you experienced it yourself."

"How can you possibly do it again?" I asked.

"Because the best things in life are the hard things," she said, her face turning wise. "In the end, the things we value are the things we work for the hardest."

At least that is worth remembering.