They don’t warn you that there’s a cumulative effect of lack of sleep. You come home expecting that how you feel now is what it’s going to be like, and there’s a few days of relief — thinking that it might be not so bad, this getting woken up every three or four hours.

“I think my body is adapting!” I remember thinking when I woke up after a couple hours sleep feeling rested, sometime during the first week. “This is doable!”

Ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha!!!

No, it’s not doable. If you want to know what it’s like to have a newborn, I’m sorry there is no good preparation for it. Setting an alarm that goes off randomly during the night — sometimes every hour, sometimes after four hours, won’t be quiet unless you stand on your head and recite the alphabet backwards, but no not like that, a little to the left or with a different accent — that might be similar. But compound that frustration with caring about this alarm and you’ve got the perfect mix of exhaustion and anxiety. Nothing prepares you for how much you will care about your new baby. No words capture that “well shit I guess my heart now resides in this eight-pound bag of bones that can’t even hold his head up” feeling.

Don’t even get me started on nursing. I’m three weeks in and formula sounds like a vacation. If I didn’t firmly believe in the health benefits of nursing I would not do it. Period. I don’t care about the so-called “bonding” and the “nursing relationship”. If reminding myself every three hours not to shake the baby is any kind of relationship to be proud of… It’s not that bad, but it gets close. I’m more frustrated with breastfeeding than anything else. I don’t understand how anyone actually enjoys it. And did you know it takes about 20 calories to make one ounce of milk? Imagine going throughout your entire day at a light jog and then don’t get enough sleep. For weeks.

Men don’t get enough sleep with a newborn either, but their bodies aren’t literally burning an extra 500+ calories a day on top of the household planning (aka the job of making sure the jobs get done — a high paying position anywhere outside the home but totally ignored as a job within the home), work (part time but still), laundry, dishes, wrangling a toddler, shh-ing and diapering and preparing meals and meanwhile trying to behave like a decent human being when all one wants to do is SLEEP.

I’m hiding from my toddler as I write this. Twenty minutes of something I enjoy, and I feel the weight of all the things I “should have” done burdening me. The dryer buzzed. There are clean clothes to put away. Dishes to do and put away. A mess the dog made chewing up paper that I should be cleaning up. Or I should at least be playing with my toddler instead of hiding around the corner so I can listen to him and the baby at the same time.

So I’ll go and do some of those things, what I can before it’s time to nurse again. This has been fun. Until next time….