New Parent Smackdown

While things are getting clearer, and we're both getting more comfortable in our abilities with the baby, I still find that the clocks in the house blitz through the hours, and each night I'm stunned to realize it is night, and the world is again asleep.

I am suffering from some insomnia, made all the more harsh for the early hours my daughter wakes up.  Luckily my husband will take her at any hour, even very very early hours.  He does so with no protest, and talks to her so lovingly that it melts my heart.  

Breastfeeding has not gone well.  We supplement with formula and even though I am thankful for some extra hours of sleep or freedom that this affords, I just opened a box and found breastmilk bags in the bottom, items I will never need, because I do not make enough breastmilk to have any extra to store.  My throat closed up and the tears started.  I can't control the surge of shame and disappointment I feel when my failure as a functioning woman is revealed to me in tiny ways throughout the day.  

I will be sending resumes out tomorrow, and I am devastated.  What if I get a job, and have to take it??? Because I would have to take it.  I didn't want to return to work this early, not when she is learning something new every day, and not when I still have a glimmer of being able to give her some benefit of breastmilk, however little I can.  Once I go back to work, there is just no way.  She is two months old next week, which seems so old but is really so little.  In that odd paradoxical way that babies get so big and yet remain so tiny and unbelievable.

I just remembered that a urine soaked diaper fell facedown on the floor by her changing table, so I'll go clean that up.  

Then I'll go to bed so I can lie there, unable to sleep, wired by the joy and the hurt and the worry and the love that shakes my mind awake.