Nancy Hua

To induce or not to induce, that is the question. At week 39, my doctor kept recommending it. 

Like I do with many medical things, I read about induction and scared myself. After my parents’ various chemo-related medical traumas, I was scared of a medical system incentivized by things other than my long term health.

I just wanted to give birth effortlessly at home in a few minutes like a stray cat, no one but my husband around. But I was also scared of dying. These competing fears warred within me. I compromised by telling myself I’d go to the hospital at the last second in case I needed emergency surgery, but mostly labor at home. 

Everyone said induction was super normal, better safe than sorry, that one study, etc. It seemed like everyone wanted me to induce, and I didn’t want to argue against the study, so I scheduled it. 

When the time came, maybe I’d decide I wanted to do it. But I didn’t want to!

At the last second, I canceled it. 

“We still haven’t tried everything,” I said. “Why is America so obsessed with that one study about inducing at 39 weeks? Reddit says other countries with better health stats don’t induce till 41 or 42 weeks. My mom supposedly gave birth to me at 43 weeks.” 

We rescheduled.

At the last second, I canceled again! 

“They’re not going to like that you keep canceling it,” my husband said.

“But I feel like I have to keep scheduling it. Everyone’s like, ‘What’s the plan if the baby doesn’t come in time?’”

“I support whatever you want to do.”

“Are you just saying that? What if I kill the baby? I don’t want to get blamed. If something’s wrong with it, promise we won’t tell anyone it was because I selfishly and willfully disregarded medical advice?”

“We’ll say it was a tragic accident that was in no way avoidable or predictable.”

Phew! Such a relief to not induce. I wonder if induction is like co-sleeping where Americans actually secretly do it, but lie about it, and the rest of the world is like, “Why are you guys stressing about this?” 

Looking back, I think I pressured myself to make the choice with my head and not my gut or heart. For me, the gut and heart often take more time to hear than my brain, so when I feel pressured then I unconsciously start to bully my body to get on board with the “rational” choice, which just makes it harder to hear what the body’s saying. The more I pressure myself, the more my body resists, and the more allure “alt” theories hold. 

As the days ticked by and our due date betting pool eliminated more and more players, I tried the various natural induction methods— ball bouncing, curb walking, yoga, spicy food. 

I did things to keep my oxytocin up because that’s the labor hormone. Whenever my husband started talking about logistics or daycare forms, I’d say, “I can’t think about this right now. It’s lowering my oxytocin.” 

I avoided anything that increased adrenaline because stress hormones delay and prolong labor. I felt a new sensitivity to these hormones and saw how Twitter increased adrenaline, so I logged out and watched Dune on repeat. 

I listened to Elvis non-stop. When I was a kid, my mom’s love of Elvis had annoyed me, but now I found him comforting. I’d forgotten how much she’d loved him. I missed my mom. 

“Are you guys impatient for the baby to come?” people asked.

“No,” I said.

“We are not ready,” my husband said. 

The only urgency I felt for labor to start was that I was sick of all the pressure to induce. We had to go to the hospital every day to check that the baby hadn’t fallen victim to my irrational, non-medically advised choice.

“I don’t need the fetal non stress test,” I kept saying. “I feel him kicking all the time.”

“Those could be kicks of distress.”

“Don’t stress me out right now. It’s lowering my oxytocin.”

Finally, during one of my 4am wakings, I felt a trickle of liquid down my thigh as I walked to the kitchen, took a photo of my mucus and blood in the toilet, and called the hospital. 

“You should come in,” they said. 

“I don’t want to wake my husband yet so maybe I can come in a few hours?” 

They seemed surprised. “I guess that’s fine.” 

Unfortunately, when we went in, they said, “We can’t find amniotic fluid. Mucus plugs aren’t *that* indicative of water breaking.” My cervix was still only 1 cm dilated, as it had been for weeks. 

As we went home and I contemplated more radical natural induction methods, I complained, “I can’t believe I had an orgasm for nothing.”

Finally, on Amit’s birthday, the buzzing Braxton Hicks contractions I’d been feeling for weeks started radiating down my legs. Were these real contractions? It felt like PMS cramps. 

Amit timed them getting closer together. 

Having been disappointed before, I kept saying, “I’m not in labor,” but we turned back early on our dog walk, one of many sacrifices our dog had to make for this baby. 

At the hospital, they strapped monitors to my stomach to check the contractions and the baby’s heart rate. The contractions felt like really bad period cramps. 

Even though I had just pooped, I felt super constipated. The baby felt like a huge poop wanting to come out of my spine, but blocked by all my bones and organs.

“If labor is anything like pooping, I’ve got this,” I proclaimed.

It felt right to labor over the toilet and I think I made a lot of progress dilating in that environment and position. 

I could feel big contractions stretch and rip my cervix. It was amazing how much breathing and meditating diminished the pain. Maybe I should’ve taken those orgasmic birth classes after all. 

Was it the worst pain I’ve ever felt? Maybe? It doesn’t compare to times I’ve been stabbed in fencing because this pain wasn’t a sharp external pressure. Rather, it was an internal, radiating, shooting, escalating ache. It felt similar to the worst period I’ve had, where the pain was so bad I barfed and couldn’t walk. 

I found hands and knees positions worked for me, but eventually I asked for fentanyl. I was curious to try this drug that’s ravaged our society, but it didn’t make me high or anything. It made the pain go away for 30 minutes, but I could still feel the contractions tightening my thorax,  and it also made me barf within minutes. 

“Can you get me the barf bag?” I asked Amit.

He shoved a garbage can towards me so roughly that it pulled the needle out of my arm and bright red blood spurted everywhere, staining the bed and my socks. Surprised, my bladder somehow let loose and I wet the bed.

Discarding the trash can, I managed to reach and puke in a cool barf bag shaped like a big condom. 

A nurse eventually came in and wanted to change the sheets. 

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can’t feel it. I do want to change my gown though because it’s soaked in pee. Can I wheel my IV bag into the bathroom?”

“I can’t have you lying in blood for the next few hours,” the nurse said.

“I almost passed out seeing the blood,” Amit said.

Since fentanyl kept wearing off, I asked for an epidural. While I sang “Amazing Grace” along with Elvis and tried to ignore everything happening to me, a nurse put a catheter in me while a man numbed my back, pushed something against me hard, fiddled around, and then the pain went away. I could press a button to get a double dose, which I tried twice to no discernible effect. 

Although they said I could sleep, I kept shivering and couldn’t. I assumed I was shivering because I was on drugs, but eventually I realized I was actually cold. 

After 6ish hazy yet sleepless hours, a new set of medical staff came in and were glad that I was 8 cm dilated. 

Nevertheless, the new doctor gave me the old spiel on how, “I prefer to induce or do a c-section to be safe because the baby could die inside you without us knowing unless we get it out.”

But there weren’t any tests or new info saying we should intervene, so I tearfully told her, “Your speech scares me. I don’t want negative information right now. I need constant praise even in normal life. I want you to encourage me and tell me what’s going well instead of focusing on potential dangers.”

“Oh no, I made you cry,” she said.

We forged onwards.

When it finally came time to push, I felt a surge of euphoria. The doctors remarked, “You seem really happy! You’re recovering between contractions really well.” I think my labor endorphins etc were strong because of my husband, and all the Dune and Elvis vibes I’d stocked up on. 

More and more new doctors and nurses entered the room, all women. 

“You’ll like this next nurse,” my 2nd main nurse said. “She’s really good.” Indeed, she did seem best at listening to me, explaining stuff in a convincing way that didn’t scare me, and staying positive. I tried to look her up later to see why she was so good, but there was no information anywhere about any of these people.

“Time to get on your back,” they kept saying.

“I really don’t like lying down,” I kept saying. “It feels like it’s pushing the baby back up. I would never poop from this position.” 

But they kept insisting and the baby was still not out, so finally I was on my back in the archetypal gyno pose. 

The doctors didn’t seem to be timing my contractions in the way that I was feeling them. The epidural eliminated the pelvic pain, but I could still feel radiating thigh pain, so I knew when contractions were happening. The medical staff kept telling me to push at times when I felt it was fruitless “purple pushing” like this Youtube doula warned against, so I ignored them and pushed whenever I felt the urge. It seemed similar to being constipated with a 10 pound poop— you can walk and drink stuff to help it along, but there’s no point in pushing until your body is ready. The doctors didn’t appear to notice my defiance.

Later, when I told Amit, he said, “I can’t believe you didn’t listen to them about the pushing!” 

“I told them I didn’t want to tire myself pushing uselessly and that I wasn’t feeling contractions when they were telling me to push.”

Maybe it would’ve been faster if I’d obeyed? Maybe the baby wouldn’t’ve had that huge, lumpy, water bed of a blood blister misshaping his head from being stuck in my vag? Maybe he wouldn’t have pooped during labor, befouling his amniotic fluid and thus having to have it suctioned out of his lungs?

We’ll never know. 

I started to grin uncontrollably. The nurses kept saying, “Wow, you seem really happy.” My body was pumping me full of something new because I felt euphoric, way better than the fentanyl or epidural had been doing.

Yet another new doctor came in and hung a big garbage bag under me. 

The prior doctor hovered at my pelvis and kept asking, “Do you want to feel his head?” while Amit and I kept silently shaking our heads, “No.”

Suddenly, the baby flew out.

Next, I’ll write about breastfeeding. 

I also wrote about pregnancy, the first month postpartum, and my first mother’s day as a mom.

My husband has many videos of me monologing, “Never forget what I am about to tell you. Pregnancy sucks. Do not do this again.” 
And yet, a few months after giving birth, the insane, primal part of me was already going, “I’ll be better at it next time! It was cool getting to wear voluminous silhouettes and embracing new feminine archetypes! We can just stay in SF/NYC during the next pregnancy so there’s more walkable food!” I felt I’d squandered my pregnancy. I should’ve savored everything more, somehow. 
So before everything gets totally distorted by rose colored evolutionary adaptions, it’s time to finally put on the internet record my experiences of pregnancy, and to-be-posted accounts of labor and breastfeeding.

When we got engaged, I drew the vision I wanted to manifest— me and my husband in an architectural marvel with our dog, cat, and baby— and put the drawing on our bedroom wall.
My husband said, “The baby looks like a boy.”
“Oh, you’re right. I don’t really know what babies look like. Should I change it? Everyone in my family is a girl, so it’ll probably be a girl.”
My husband shrugged, then got excited. “We’re doing it! We’re getting married and we’ll have a kid and buy a house. This could all come true this year!”
“Yes, including the cat!” My old cat died last year, but I put a cat in the drawing because I wanted another. My husband was against this because he wanted a pet-free period, and also felt the cat stole my attention, so I often teased him by threatening to get a cat unilaterally. 
My husband retorted, “Actually, this baby looks at least a few years old.”

6 months later, my husband and I stood in our bathroom arguing over a tiny ladle of my urine. 
“You’re not doing it right,” my husband said. “You have to wait exactly 10 minutes. I put this timer here expressly for this purpose. After you dip the strip into pee, you flip the timer over—” 
“Why would that matter? And both that fertility book and my OB said we shouldn’t use the test strips because they’re unreliable.”
“You never believe me. I researched this and the timer really matters for the test result. If we’re doing this, can we do it right? Your way isn’t working.”
“I don’t find this fun. Why can’t this be easy and romantic?”
“Because it’s hard and arduous. People try for years to conceive. Someone else just told me they wish they’d gotten hormone injections sooner— would’ve saved them a year. Best case scenario, I’ll be in my 60’s by the time our kid’s an adult, and then I’ll be dead! You’ll get the injections next month?”
“It’s scheduled,” I ground out. “I’m over here wearing crazy lingerie, logging our sex and my cervical fluid in an app, testing my pee every few hours, cross referencing my basal body temperature, and scheduling hormone injections, while you’re criticizing me. Why don’t you time the test strips?”
I didn’t expect my husband to do it, but he loves timing things and following product instructions. So now every time I went to the bathroom, he joined me to test my pee with his new gadget. He was so sincerely meticulous about it that I almost felt bad for making him do it, but I also felt like he should have to put in work too, even if it didn’t make sense logistically or biologically. 
Later, we found out that, the first time we had sex after my husband took over using his timer method, I got pregnant. 

I didn’t find out I was pregnant till I was 6 weeks in. I hadn’t seen my husband in weeks because I was traveling, which can delay my period. 
I only eventually realized I was pregnant because I suddenly felt like shit. Exhausted, drifting on the border of consciousness, I couldn’t even sleep because I felt so nauseous and sore. With a week in SF, I’d had plans to go to Barry’s Bootcamp, museums, and my old haunts, but instead I just lay in bed at Doug and Deena’s house. I ordered another COVID test.
Almost on a whim, I also ordered a pregnancy test.
The results came in: negative on COVID, positive on pregnant…! 
I was more relieved than anything. I’d been scared I wouldn’t be able to do it. But now it had happened.
We did it! I did it, and I didn’t even need hormone injections! My husband was so excited, he rushed home from a party, bringing an assortment of groceries I decided I needed, along with his own innovative solutions for nausea. 

A day after realizing I was pregnant, I became clear on what I wanted: a community that revolved around me and my house. I saw that even though I’d moved to Hawaii, I still visited SF every 2 months because I was scared to let it go, scared that I’d never have the friends in Hawaii that I had in SF. Out of fear and scarcity, I was maintaining a community that revolved around SF instead of around me, which was leading me to stay in various groups that no longer fit my life. I didn’t want to do that anymore. 
Although it was scary for me to leave groups that I’d been in for years and had changed my life and had so many favorite people, I saw I wanted to let them go so I could make space for the unknown new community that was what I really wanted, but had been too scared to admit to myself. Nausea made it clear to me that I didn’t have space for anything that wasn’t exquisite. It made it easy for me to cut the crap, because the thought of traveling or even leaving my house made me want to vomit. Anything that wasn’t a community centered around me was barf worthy. Pregnancy gave me the gift of nausea, a signal to show what I really wanted. 

Another pregnancy gift was an overriding sense of contentment. Almost immediately, I saw that I was enough. I deleted everything with a news feed because I didn’t need the adrenaline or dopamine anymore now that I was hopped up on pregnancy hormones. Although I’d always known intellectually that I was “enough,” now I deeply felt in my body the truth that I didn’t have to do anything. 
In the past, no matter what I’ve achieved, I’ve always felt like I needed to climb a new mountain. The idea of underperforming my potential seemed sacreligious, disgusting, and at least embarrassing. Ambition was good, complacency was evil, grow or die. But now I saw that nothing mattered. I am enough. 

I have a long list of pregnancy pains, which I was naively surprised by because I’m used to escaping unscathed from everything. I spent the first 4+ months of pregnancy lying in the dark with AC blasting and watching reality tv. Now I wonder, was I depressed? I definitely wasn’t normal.
After spending hours trying to eat the most bland foods, only to barf it all up right before bed, I told my husband, “This must be what leukemia was like, where you wanted to eat but couldn’t because you were so nauseous.”
My husband frowned. “No, cancer is way worse.”
“You don’t know that. I can’t even sleep because I wake up starving and then I have to stuff food down my maw in the darkness even though the feeling of anything in my mouth makes me gag. Even brushing my teeth makes me gag. And I have plaque buildup because of pregnancy saliva shit.” On my bedstand, I kept what I called my “night nuts” and my “night sweet potato.” 
“Do you have anal fissures?” he retorted.
“No, but some pregnant women get it, and I have shooting pain up my butt. They call it lightning crotch. I have so much random shooting pain. I can’t even lay on my back because then my uterus pushes against the nerves in my back which makes me dizzy and unable to breathe. As soon as the doctor makes me lie back for the exam, I start panting and blacking out. I can’t lie on my left side either because then my uterus pushes against some organ and because of my rib flare and I get stabbing pains. So I can only lie on my right side, not that I can sleep anyway because of pregnancy insomnia. Incessant stabbing pains are just normal for me now.”
Pregnancy is not the same as wearing a weighted suit because the weight is inside the body, pushing up against the organs, which affects those organs’ ability to function. Previously normal movements or barely noticeable acts like eating, drinking, digesting, and pooping now caused constant aches and shooting pains.
Powering through nausea to eat, barfing up everything that took hours to eat and having to start all over, waking up starving to chug olive oil, not being able to eat a lot at once because my stomach was being compressed from below by my growing uterus and thus having to eat small amounts constantly, getting heartburn because hormones were making my esophageal muscles unable to keep stomach acid down, stabbing pains in my pelvis and butt, radiating pain in my back and legs, having to use k tape to tape up my stomach so that it wasn’t causing stabbing pain in my pelvis through the ligaments stretching, getting bruises from removing the k tape because my belly skin was so thin and stretched, chafing and rashes under my boobs from my expanding boobs rubbing against my expanding stomach— so many ailments that I couldn’t keep up. 
Finally, I had to surrender to my body. It was a role reversal from my usual mentality of using my body as a tool. Time was my ally. I kept reminding myself: everything is temporary. If I just wait, all this will end, one way or another.
So I spent much of pregnancy panting, struggling to breathe while bemoaning my huge thorax, trying to force food down despite my nausea, breathing through various radiating and shooting pains, and trying to devote myself more to my body, with limited success. For 8 months, I couldn’t take a full breath because the baby pushed against my diaphragm. 
For the last few months, he was kicking against my ribs, diaphragm, and bladder, especially in the evening or if I drank juice, which was both cool and horrible. The killer was inside the house. 
The body can get used to anything though, and after a while I got used to constant stabbing pains, shortness of breath, reflux, etc. 
“This is how my baby will feel,” I thought. “The baby will have issues keeping food down, eating, sleeping, pooping, everything. This is just the pain of being alive and having a body, and I’m enduring this so I can empathize more with the baby.”
Eating was so hard that I weighed less at 5 months pregnant than when I got pregnant. Frozen things had less odor so were easier to eat. All day, I’d try to eat frozen bread and popsicles. Scouring reddit for ideas, I bought every food imaginable and logged my food and calories to try to cross correlate to figure out what decreased barfing. 
Amit bought a fancy ice cream maker so that he could make salad and protein shakes— my pre-pregnancy staple foods— into ice cream. 
“How’s the salad protein ice cream?” he’d ask me after each new concoction. After my answer, he’d triumphantly reveal with glee, “I added olive oil to it!”

Every month, I’d have a meltdown and sob to Amit about how much I hated pregnancy, how I was scared I wasn’t getting enough nutrients for myself or the baby, how the doctors scared me and didn’t care about my health. 
Although we did the parenthood class at the hospital, I wasn’t preparing for the future. I was focused on the day to day of pregnancy and my own sensations, not the baby. 
“The baby is me,” I said. “I take care of the baby by taking care of me. Which is why I need to buy myself more jewelry.”
My husband and I had different nesting modes: I started rearranging furniture and buying things, whereas he started reorganizing the kitchen, forcing us to finish forgotten foods, and labeling things. 
Our house came furnished so nothing is as we would’ve chosen for ourselves, and we weren’t ready to invest in a rental, especially because furniture takes forever to ship to Hawaii. I compromised by buying pillow covers and hiding the furniture that came with the house with random sheets. 
“Should we buy a changing table?” my husband asked me. 
“No. I don’t want to buy anything for the baby. We can change him on the ground.” (Indeed, for the first month, we used a puppy pad to change him on the guest bed.)
“Should we buy a snoo?”
“If you want. But he can sleep on Leah’s dog bed like Jesse’s baby.”
After we eventually bought a changing table and all the normal things, and lots of random other stuff, eventually my husband realized, “I should just buy whatever I want without asking you because you always lag me by a few months.”

The fact is, until after I gave birth, I wasn’t ready for the baby. My own inner child was having a tantrum clinging to the status quo and scared of giving up her role as the only baby.
On our 3rd date, I made Amit promise that we’d always prioritize each other above our kids. “If there’s a choice between 1% probability of saving my life and 100% probability of killing the kid, you have to choose me. We can always make more kids. And ideally they’ll eventually move out of the house whereas we’ll be together forever.” Having to sacrifice myself for needier/ more aggressive kids was an existential fear that came from my infancy, and pregnancy was triggering this fear. 
When my due date came and went, everyone started talking about inductions. I said, “I’m scared of escalating interventions and potentially having a C section.” 
People said, “It’s fine; people have C sections all the time.” 
Amit stood up for me, “She doesn’t want a C section.” 
I cried, touched that Amit cared about me, and scared that no one else did. 
I realized my indifference towards babies had actually been fear and envy. I wanted to be the baby! 
Whenever people assumed I’d sacrifice my comfort or wellbeing for the baby, my inner child wept, “What about me?” Abandoned and hurt in the past, she was scared of the indifferent world that’d moved on. 
I told her, “It’s ok. That makes sense. Things are changing. But I’ll always stick up for you. You don’t have to pay attention to other people.”
When surely well meaning people dismissed my feelings and projected onto me, “It doesn’t matter if you tear,” or, “You won’t care about xyz after you give birth,” I very calmly muttered under my breath, “How about you go F* yourself?” which is uncharacteristic of me but something I needed to do for my inner child.
Finally, my inner child met my future son and made peace with other babies. Now she’s happy to have a new playmate and finds everything he does hilarious.

Other revelations due to pregnancy:

• Due to increased blood flow and hormones, orgasming became super easy! I’d have sex dreams and could orgasm without anything, which had never happened before. 
• A related revelation that came from giving birth was the sensation of my womb. I’d only vaguely felt my womb before via period pains, but during labor I felt it moving, which hadn’t happened before. So many new features unlocked! Now I still feel it (and I think other new stuff) when I orgasm. It’s crazy how little anyone understands about female anatomy. 
• Physically, as my silhouette changed, I took the opportunity to embrace other feminine forms of beauty. I’d never worn clothes that weren’t fitted around the waist, but now I embraced weird shapes and structures. Looking at old photos of my mom, I newly appreciated her stylishness and saw how it informed my own sense of fashion. I view my pregnancy as key to my style evolution and appreciating my mom. 
• I felt connected to all mothers. I’d never really been interested in the mother archetype before, but it’s the universal human experience of all our ancestors. I felt fascinated that this was how humans were made, and that we were doing it.  Reddit gave me so much solace. Old me would’ve said the average redditor is an idiot. New me loves the wisdom of idiots. 
• I felt more appreciation for Amit. When we found out we were having a boy, I immediately hoped he’d be a mini-Amit. Prior to pregnancy, I wanted kids to glorify my ego. Now that urge melted away without a word. All I wanted was more of my husband Amit, my favorite person. I don’t need greatness or immortality. I only need my family, and to buy things online whenever I want. 

Initially I’d told Amit I wanted to use a surrogate but he pitched that he would rub my feet and bring me food. He did feed me, but it wasn’t the Chinese food I was craving, and it was obvious he wasn’t that into massaging me. 

Instead, my favorite parts of pregnancy turned out to be unexpected!

• I loved our photoshoot. Amit said, “Let’s wait till you’re really huge,” so we waited till I was 9 months pregnant! I don’t know if I have any other photos of me in a bathing suit but pregnancy gave me new levels of comfort with showing my body in all its forms. 
• I love clothes and shopping. I didn’t buy too many maternity clothes, but rather explored designers who had never appealed to me before because they weren’t sexy, pretty, or romantic, but rather oversized, confusing, and weird. 
• Our friends were in a big chat group that bet on the birth date (my mother in law won! I scheduled and canceled 2 inductions which threw the betting chat into chaos) and suggested baby names. We said we wanted our baby to commune with the divine, care for us when we were old, and to have a unique name reminiscent of an unhinged celebrity baby. There were so many sincere ideas proposed that would inevitably devolve into nerd puns. Ultimately, Amit came up with the name while talking with one of the chat friends. Even after we put it on the birth certificate, which they pressured us to do ASAP because they needed a name to put on insurance forms, we were like, “Did we really name him this?” We almost never use his first name though and call him by his middle name. His middle name is inspired by one of my GETCO friends who I call Fraba but who Amit remembered as Baba, which is incidentally Fraba’s actual last name. 
• My enneagram 7 loves the novelty of pregnancy. On top of all the new features and sensations, now I know more about what various chronic ailments feel like and can relate more to the breadth of human experience. Basically the body breaking down sucks and is generally invisible to outsiders so they keep forgetting it’s painful for you to lie down or stand or breathe.

More to come on breastfeeding! I also wrote about labor, the first month postpartum, and my first mother’s day as a mom.

“For sale: Baby shoes. Never Worn.” 

In the “before” days, I interpreted this microfiction to be a hearstoppingly tragic story of a lost family vision. Now that my brain has been reformatted into mom mode, my mind now jumps to new interpretations: 

• The story is an indictment of corporations preying on new parents’ fears and ignorance so they buy more baby things than possibly needed.
• Indeed, baby clothing sizing is crazy. Who sizes humans by age?
• The story is a hilarious commentary on the myriad useless baby objects— babies don’t need shoes because they can’t walk.
• The story shows the futility of dressing rolling babies in clothes that are not well designed for easy on/off.
• The story is a celebration of living in a tropical paradise because Hawaiian babies don’t need shoes, or most clothing.
• The story shows overeager purchasing by new moms who order clothes that take months to arrive from off island and the baby grows out of it long before wearing it.

At one of our first social gatherings after giving birth, someone asked, “How’s motherhood?”

I haltingly answered, “I’m… not… very… sleep… full.” 

Sleep deprivation is brain damage! 

Nevertheless, even when I was at my most sleep deprived and averaging 5 hours a day fragmented into 2 hour chunks, instead of sleeping while my baby slept, I’d zoom up on the baby monitor to see if he was still breathing. Babyvision was my favorite tv show— we’d put his video feed up on the TV to watch him fling himself around in his sleep. 

My husband would implore me to sleep, but it was hard to not watch the baby. Oscillating between awe and anxiety, I’d stare at how beautiful he was. 

“The camera got unplugged. Should we go in his room to fix it?”

“No, just go to sleep. If he’s dead, he’s dead!” 

As soon as I appreciate something about my baby, the next moment I scare myself because what if he loses it? He’s so cute— but what if he gets disfigured by some horrible accident?! He laughs so easily— but what if he gets traumatized by something bad?! He’s so sweet and smiley— but what if he gets taken advantage of by some predator?! Staying sane is an exercise in non-attachment. 

When I’m so exhausted and angry and tell my husband, “Let’s send him to boarding school,” I just take another hit of breastfeeding MDMA and I’m back to “I’m going to home school him.”

Now it makes sense why I watched Dune repeatedly in the week before giving birth— the fantasy of psychedelic spice being the most powerful substance in the universe that lets humans bend space time appealed to me because my consciousness intuited the parallels to the altered state of motherhood. The spice agony of breastfeeding has transformed my body and mind beyond baseline humanity. Motherhood’s prescience, ancestral memory, and heightened awareness gave me the power to form the future of our species and hence our universe! And the only costs are: I fall into a spice trance whenever I inhale too much of my baby; I must maintain strict water discipline when it comes to my milk, sleep, emotions, and other reserves lest I die in the desert; and the spice addiction to my baby sandworm and never being able to return to paradise…

Anyway, for my first mother’s day, I’m celebrating how awesome I am! I’ve only thunked his head against stuff twice (that I’m aware of). I change his diaper with superhuman efficiency, pulling wipes out in advance so they don’t get tangled in the dispenser, positioning his new diaper underneath the old one so there aren’t leaks, and all my supermom techniques. I can get him to sleep or stop crying with a single boob. He literally sucks my blood in the form of breastmilk and is so addicted to it he sometimes can’t sleep without it. I can hear his cry even if I’m dead asleep several rooms away and I stagger up no matter what like an aging prizefighter. I buy all the crazy mom stuff I see ads for. I excel at dressing my entire family in matching outfits. I finally mastered babywearing, my version of the Fremen stillsuit. And I have a lot of baby shoes he’s never worn if you want them. Happy mother’s day! 

I also wrote about pregnancy, labor, and the first month postpartum.

When they flung him onto my chest, he flopped like a silent swamp creature, dripping with yellow goop. Gaping and groping, staring with crazy eyes, toes flexing far apart like monkey hands, he didn’t resemble anyone I knew. As I gazed into the uncanny valley of this newborn baby, I lay frozen in horror. 

Amit said, “Look at him move; he’s like a robot. Maybe he’s jerky because he’s moving through air instead of liquid for the first time.” They took him into the corner to be suctioned and poked and processed. He let out his first sound, a wail. 

“Don’t look over there,” Amit said. Turning away from the cluster of nurses with their tubes, I glanced down where a doctor was blithely stitching me up while chatting with another doctor. “Don’t look down there either,” Amit said. “Look at me. How do you feel?”

“Weirded out. Relieved it’s over.” I thought the baby was gross, but I didn’t want to say that in front of all these women who probably thought he was adorable. “Do you feel love at first sight for this baby?” 

We both shook our heads no. 

All in all, labor lasted 16 hours. I hadn’t slept in more than 24 hours, so I took a nap. Upon waking maybe an hour later, my first words were, “My vag is on fire.” 

When we settled into our hospital room, the baby was in another room under a heating lamp. Amit said, “I was looking at him through the window laying in his box. No one was paying attention to him and he’s all alone. I feel sorry for him. He’s too small to be alive.”

I felt a surge of love for Amit’s compassion and soft heartedness. “Aw, you’re so caring. He still doesn’t feel like he’s ours.” 

“I hope he’ll be happy.”

Amit’s helpless pity for this creature triggered my pity too. The feeling was familiar, like my pity for cats and dogs and most animals. I didn’t know it then, but this pity quickly segued into love. 

We hired a confinement nanny “yue sau” to live with us and take care of everything for up to the first 26 days. She cooked, cleaned, and mainly kept the baby in her room, only bringing him out for me to breastfeed. She promised to take care of everything, but I found I didn’t want her to. She kept wanting me to sleep, but I often couldn’t. At the hospital, I only slept 2 hours a night because of all the interruptions, but at home I still couldn’t sleep. Maybe I was still amped up on hormones. 

I wanted to know everything about the baby. My modus operandi was the same as how I cared for my cat— keeping notes on her ailments and patterns, constantly inspecting her for changes, continuously testing new theories in hopes of understanding her better. Similarly, I wanted to change his diaper so I could see all his poops so I knew their colors and textures to discern how he was digesting what we’d fed him 2 hours prior, I wanted to inspect every fleeting rash and groom the gunk in all his folds and pry open his fingers to get the lint he’s clutching, I wanted to learn all his noises and signals so I could anticipate his needs before he felt discomfort. 

Because of the connection between my breasts and his stomach, I knew he was awake and went to feed him in the middle of the night before he made a peep. After the second day of me constantly knocking to check on him, the nanny put a pillow on the floor of her room as a doorstop to keep the door open enough for me to stick my head in to watch him breathe. 

After 6 days, she said, “Maybe I should go home early. You don’t need me. You’re strong, and you delivered vaginally. Most of my customers don’t leave the bed for 10 days, but you went out walking and shopping today. The baby’s also particularly sweet and well behaved. It must be because he came 2 weeks late so he’s actually older.”

Although sending the nanny home early was what my husband and I had been thinking because the nanny was expensive, that night I burst into tears. “She’s supposed to want to take care of me but I’m too annoying. She wants to take care of the baby, not me.”

My husband got the nanny. “Nancy’s crying because she thinks you hate her.”

“I don’t hate you!” the nanny said. “Don’t cry or it’ll poison your milk. I’m thinking of you as my daughter because I don’t have a daughter. I’m too expensive for what you have me doing. Usually the grandparents pay for me. Of course I like you. Anyone who’s vegetarian is a good person.”

She eventually convinced me that it was purely a cost calculation she’d been making on our behalf. That night, we moved the crib into our room to do a trial run of what would happen if she left. 

At 4am, Amit found me crying and desperately asking chatgpt what to do about milk blisters that had appeared on my nipples after my pump had been adjusted to the wrong setting. “This is the nanny’s fault. She insisted I had to go on a higher suction but now I have milk blisters! And it made almost no milk whereas I was doing great on the lower setting so now I have to stay awake to breastfeed even though it hurts. She sucks! And I hate breastfeeding. Why am I doing this? My clogged ducts hurt and I’m scared of getting an infection. On reddit, this woman had a huge abscess inside her boob that had to get drained. The lactation consultant is an idiot and wants me to wake up every hour to feed him. She didn’t even ask me any questions about my goals or anything. I hate her. Why am I hurting my body? Everyone else is on formula!”

At around 5am, the nanny woke up and came out. Seeing my sleepless, tearstained face, she said, “Give me the baby. Get some rest.”

Amit said, “This was a successful trial. Now we know what could happen if we have her leave.” We moved the crib back into the nanny’s room. 

A week later, I had throbbing pain in my arms and hands from holding the baby for breastfeeding 12 hours a day. I had the special breastfeeding pillows but the internet said it was the relaxin hormones deforming my joints. I could barely move. Amit and the nanny had to dock the baby’s mouth and the breast pump onto my boobs while I sat in pain, ice packed around both arms and hands. When Amit turned on the pump, the default setting was the highest suction possible and I gasped in pain. Trying to put the flange on my nipple, the nanny spilled breast milk over me and the couch, causing me to yelp and exclaim, “You put it on upside down!” Ignoring my pain, the baby guzzled away at the other breast.

Later that night, I burst into tears again. “I peed myself heading to the bathroom and was struggling to change my ice packed, blood soaked underwear when the baby started crying. I couldn’t even move my arms to put on new underwear and had to go get the nanny without underwear. She’d seen my boobs before but not my vag. I hate this! What if I’m incontinent forever? What if I have tendonitis and carpal tunnel and arthritis and swelling and sciatica forever? My face and feet are so swollen. I can’t even sleep because of the pain radiating everywhere. What if I can’t use my hands and arms and have to learn to be like that Olympics archer who shoots with her feet? Why am I hurting my body?”

Breastfeeding was so much harder than pregnancy or labor. Many times, I wanted to quit, but I’d decided to breastfeed till 6 weeks because that’s when people said it normalized, so I kept suffering through it. I could always quit then. This was all temporary. This was a universal human experience that I needed to endure if only to build character and empathy for other moms. How did everyone else do this? Did everyone really do this? I spent sleepless days and nights icing, heating, and massaging my breasts, icing my hands and arms, and researching newborns and breastfeeding.

Just like with pregnancy, I tried many tactics and theories for breastfeeding. Just like with pregnancy, things improved due to time passing. He changed and grew every day. At 2 weeks postpartum, we moved the crib back into our room to do another trial. This time, I took care of the baby through the night by myself without incident and wrote up a checklist for nighttime, general instructions that I translated into Chinese for the nanny, and notes on my key learnings. After a few days of this, the nanny said she was going to look for flights to go home. 

I got the urge to be with other moms and babies. I went from knowing almost nothing about babies and breastfeeding to reading and watching everything I could find, but I still only had experience with my baby. I wanted to breastfeed another baby to gain context for what they were like. I texted other moms asking for advice. “You’ve changed,” my friend said. “When we FaceTimed I used to angle the camera away from my kid and avoid mentioning him because I thought it’d make you mad, but now you want to talk to him and you’re showing him to your husband.” Having a baby has unlocked the part of my brain that used to be devoted to animals. If you want to talk about babies, ping me.

He seems like the archetypal baby, doing things that probably all newborns do, but that I’m seeing for the first time: his squeaky hiccups, his tragic frown mask, his instant placid calm when he’s soothed, his inchworm-like arches and faceplants, his blind motorboat mouth, his unproductive kicks and beating fists as I’m trying to give him what he wants, his flapping hands when he’s relaxed, his fingernails pricking my chest, his sudden fling backwards when he’s had enough, his hands mashing his face as he grins with his eyes closed, his beautiful smile, his creepy laugh as he sleeps, his smears of bright orange or mustard poop that smell like fresh bread (apparently normal), his glowing skin with angry rashes that come and go in hours and days, how intently he feasts like it’s his job, which it is… So many things. I feel awe when I find his tiny, perfectly curled eyelash on my chest. Everything he does makes me laugh. His cries are so cartoonish with his quivering chin, pouting frown, vibrating tongue, and toothless mouth. His butt really is insanely soft. He’s like what all babies are like, and yet it seems freshly delightful. It’s like how all cats are similar and I can love them all, but I especially know and love the random one that’s mine. 

Breastfeeding’s release of oxytocin is like a partial dose of MDMA every 2-3 hours every day. Like with MDMA, as soon as each session starts, I feel insanely thirsty, my individual teeth clicking dryly in my mouth. After a few days of this, I was obsessed with my baby. After a week, I felt universal love for all humans. “You’re ooey gooey now,” Amit said. “You love all babies, and anyone who has ever been a baby. Don’t forget, you made me promise to prioritize us above the baby. You vowed you’d love us first, then our dog, and babies last.” But the hormones were changing me.

I saw a homeless addict and cried. This person had probably been treasured by their mother. And even if not, someone had cared about them enough to keep them alive as a helpless newborn that needed feeding every 2 hours for months. Attention had gone into this person, and now this was their life. What if this happened to my boy? There would be nothing I could do to fight the world and its suffering and my kid’s choices. I could only love him and let the heartbreak of existence wash over me without drowning in it. 

A video of kids killed in a war zone made me sob. Eyes closed, they looked just like my kid when he slept. I let myself feel the heartbreak of their pain, feeling the cuts on their bodies slice through my heart. I felt how we’re all connected, and that as long as there’s indifference, ignorance, scarcity, blame, and danger in the world, my child wouldn’t be safe. I wanted to protect him so the world could never hurt him, but I saw the futility of it, because cruelty, ignorance, and violence are inside each of us, born from the same womb as love, curiosity, and drive. All I want is for my child to be happy, but I can’t control that. I can only love him, and let my heart break again and again as long as the world exists with us in it. My child, I already weep for your inevitable hurts, but my heartbreak deepens my awe that you or any of us are alive.

I also wrote about pregnancy, labor, and my first mother’s day as a mom.