All babby all the time.
Today I went to a pediatrician who specializes in breast feeding and had my son’s frenulum clipped. I cried almost as much as he did. The frenulum is a piece of tissue that connects the base of the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, and if it’s too tight then it’s called a tongue tie and it makes breast feeding hell. Dax had a slight tongue tie, and I’m hoping that having it cut will help resolve some overwhelming issues I’ve had with feeding him. I would like to no longer be in pain every single time of the many, many times he eats day and night.
I’d also really like to find time to write about my birth experience, mostly so that I can remember it in an honest way because already my brain is trying to convince me that having him without any major interventions or pain relief was nbd. It was not. It was an incredible bd. But the one thing it did for me was to show me what my body and mind are both capable of. Knowing that the boundaries of my limitations lie far further apart than I could have ever guessed has been one of the only things that has gotten me through this past month.
One thing that has surprised me is how willing I am to accept all this, to do what it takes to keep charging through a truly awful breast feeding experience, to try to placate an often unhappy baby, to figure out how to get him to sleep one stretch of sleep at a time. I had worried that I would resent a difficult baby, but I’ve found the opposite true. He needs me so much I don’t have any other choice than to be absolutely present with him, to love him more fiercely, to respond to him with more patience and sensitivity.
He’s a month old. Soon we’ll turn a corner and be out of these dark woods. In the meantime it helps that he’s insanely cute.
