These are the days. Fuck, this week has been difficult. I don’t think I have had more than 3 hours of sleep for the last 5 days. Last night when I woke up to feed Olive for the 7th time, I think I started to go a little insane. I wondered to myself, could I actually just run away and hide somewhere. Just to get a couple of hours sleep.
Obviously I didn’t. Olive needs me, and I also need her. It’s strange how you can become so reliant on a tiny human. One who you only met a few months before, who literally can’t do anything for themselves. Olive is going through some kind of sleep regression at the moment. If you haven’t heard of this phrase before it basically means YOUR BABY NO LONGER SLEEPS. Or at least that’s what it seems to mean to Olive.
We used to have 3 foolproof methods of getting her to sleep; walking around with her in the sling, feeding, and laying her on my husbands chest. None of these work anymore. She does eventually fall asleep on me, after several failed attempts at feeding/walking round with the sling. But usually by this time it is gone midnight, and then she wakes up every hour after that to feed.
By morning the desperation for sleep has morphed into some kind of hallucinogenic euphoria
The day continues with no hard feelings. There is something humbling about motherhood, the way you just drop everything to keep them happy. I don’t think I was ever a selfish person before but I had definitely never given this much of myself to anything until I had a baby. I would do anything for her.
As I sit here, Olive happily sleeping on my chest, a peaceful content sleep, the opposite of last night. I remind myself that these are the days I’ll miss.
By morning, I don’t care that I barely slept and I don’t care that the same thing will happen again tonight. The feeling of heart-wrenching love seems to carry me, the type that feels like all my insides are being smushed into one large patty.
I want to squash her into me but I’m not going to because I’m not silly enough to wake a sleeping baby. There is a phrase for this, it’s called ‘cuteness aggression’. Its thought to be a way of coping with overwhelming positive emotions, like joy or excitement, like when you want to squeeze a baby animal, or pinch the cheeks of a child. I have this feeling all the time.
Emotions are an essential part of what makes us human. The good and the bad
When people are labelled ’emotional’ it is usually in a negative way, but isn’t this what being human is all about? They help us navigate the world around us, form connections and make decisions.
Becoming a Mum made me feel so human. Feeling emotions so intensely. Like crying happy tears. I like to think that tears are just emotions that your body can’t hold onto anymore, because you are ‘feeling’ so fully, so human.
I have never been the type of person to just cry out of happiness, but the first time I cried happy tears was at my cousin Chris and his Wife Amy’s wedding, which was weirdly the same month I got pregnant. It was a beautiful wedding and I love them both very much but it still surprised me that I felt like crying. Weird coincidence or was it my body preparing me to feel emotions more fully than I was used to?
Since Olive has been born I want to cry a lot of happy tears. I pick her up out of her pram while were walking the dog because she’s fed up, and I’ll show her the trees, and she stares in amazement. The innocence of a baby is beautiful. Sometimes she shrieks because she has learnt a new noise, or pulls my hair so tightly like she’s thinking if she holds my hair then I can’t go anywhere. And I just think to myself, life can’t get any better.
These are the days I’ll miss.
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