How Baby

First, an update: a lot of the smoke cleared! And to celebrate, I spent the weekend inside crunching on getting ahead on comics for the upcoming convention weekends. Glamorous 24/7.

I learned pretty early on in my pregnancy that people get pretty uncomfortable if you’re anything but “excited” about having a baby. Never mind that pregnancy itself is uncomfortable, painful, and inconvenient, or that labour is a black box of unknowable outcomes (including a non-zero chance of death), and that early motherhood is by all metrics a total shitshow — you’re a mother now, so how you actually feel doesn’t matter. You’re simply excited about this new life growing inside of you, right?

Personally, I react to extreme stress by shutting down emotionally. Which means that, in a crisis, I am a pretty good person to have around. However, when pregnancy is just a forty-week-long crisis, it makes it hard to feel things that other people are saying you should feel.

I’ve come to the realization that must be part of the reason I had such a hard time bonding with Momo at first. Exhausted, wounded, overwhelmed… of course, I was in Crisis Mode. It wasn’t until I’d gotten my feet back under me that I could let those emotions back in. And by then, it wasn’t excitement any more, it was all that other cheesy stuff, like love.