My last grandchild looks like a growth on the GAP’s chest. He’s comfortable being carried in a sling. By the time he comes out of the cocoon, he’ll probably be ready to drive a car.
I guess there are always fads in parenting.
I had foolishly decided to have my children by natural childbirth. Somehow I had thought natural meant in nine months I’d get a knock and a cute little rosy-cheeked infant would step out. Natural was a paradox — a trick doctors and retailers played on us. If you ate naturally, you paid more for food and actually had to cook meals. If you were a natural at something, you became an overnight success after years of hard work. If you opted for natural childbirth (a term coined by a male), it meant excruciating pain.
The GAP’s birth had been bad enough. When my husband said, “Come on, count like they taught you in the Lamaze class,” I’d been tempted to hold up a stiff middle finger, and say “One.”
But CoCo took any hopes of instant baby and put them on the labor room’s doorstep. I had only one contraction with her — it lasted four hours. “Take this baby,” I pleaded softly and cajoled. When that didn’t work, I yelled, “Either get this thing out or I’m gonna give you a bad time!”
The doctor did his best to ignore me. “Give me anything you’ve got,” I demanded.
“You said you wanted to go natural,” he said calmly.
“Natural was before I realized I was passing a ham.” And ham she was. Ten pounds of baby.
“Wow,” people gasped, “that’s a big baby.”
Sure it sounded like a lot of baby — until I revealed, “I gained seventy-seven pounds during my pregnancy.” Even my belly button unwound.
“That’s because she was so large,” friends kindly commented. Heck, I could have had seven of her. A permanent crease carved itself down the middle of her chest when she folded in half to pass through the birth canal.
Breastfeeding was overrated, too. Grandma Lang had stayed with me a few days after the GAP’s birth. My milk came in my first day home from the hospital — more like water gushing through a broken main. The only mammal that could possibly have fit its jaws around my engorged breast was a baby hippopotamus. Grandma, a former Arizona ranch hand, had no hankering for sissies. She heated a pot of water, dipped towels into the boiling liquid, and slapped them on my chest. “That’ll soften you up,” she claimed.
The flaming towels ate away at my flesh. At the emergency hospital, nurses clamped a breast pump on me. By the time the sucking sound subsided, my nipples resembled a cow’s utter and my bank account was empty. I could have got the same relief (and a lot cheaper) from the Cow section at my local feed and grain store.
I think Mark Twain’s down home advice would have worked just as well without all that painful bonding stuff. Let me paraphrase for you young mothers: Feed ‘em until they turn thirteen and then stick ‘em in a pickle barrel. Nail a lid on real tight. Put a straw in the knothole and feed ‘em through the straw. When they turn sixteen, take the straw out and plug the hole.
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And they say you forget the bad stuff associated with childbirth ~ I haven’t either. It does have humorous reflection though.
Fun to see some pics!