fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3332 ]

[ SECRET POST #3332 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3332 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

(David Bowie)

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03.

(Great British Bake Off for Sports Relief, Ed Balls)

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04.

[Pokemon]

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05.

[Star Wars: TFA]

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06.

[Damian Lewis, Dick Winters, Band Of Brothers]

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07.

[Daughter of the Lilies]

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08.

[David Eddings]

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09.

[Sengoku Basara]

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10.

[JJBA]

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11.

[Men In Black I, II, III]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #476.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Having a baby is fucking hard and it's difficult to talk about because you're supposed to be happy all of the time and feel this supreme unconditional love. And giving birth is supposed to be painful but not traumatic, because if it's traumatic, then that takes away from the joy of having Teh Babby, and no one wants to hear about why you don't want a second kid, they just want to tell you how much you're totally going to want one in a year or two.

I had an adherent placenta and came close to bleeding to death. I loved my son from the get-go, but not more than I'd ever loved another; I love my husband enough that the bar was set pretty high. I could never be a stay-at-home mom because it would drive me crazy. And the newborn phase made me miserable.

No one talks about what it's really like. There's this shroud of secrecy that you aren't allowed to penetrate until you've had a kid of your own. And it's bullshit. And it makes me angry. And it makes me want to tell the truth to every woman who wants a kid or who is pregnant, because it would have been so much easier if I'd had a better idea of what to expect.

If it makes you feel better, I actually hear this all the goddamn time from women who feel exactly like you. Maybe because being a man sort of omits me from the Cult Of Motherhood that can be so infectious and dogmatic in this society. Maybe because people just tend to talk to me about things like this.

And... also maybe because the in the medical field it's pertinent not to tell the entire truth about how dangerous pregnancy can be or give expectations about the results. It's hard to justify laying out every single risk to people who are already going through a sea of worries and expectations and hormones. Beyond educating about PPD, it's also hard to justify telling an expectant mother that actually... she might not immediately love her child. Maybe it might even take months for her to care about it.

It's not really what a lot of people want to hear.

Being a man is probably part of it, because there's a lot of defensiveness and one-up-manship and denial among mothers, and it's tedious and stifling. Because of it, I have very few friends who are moms.

But, you know, I think there is justification for telling the expectant what might actually happen. There is so much guilt and so much sorrow among new mothers, and it stems from the fact that they're told things that are not true for them. PPD is exacerbated by women not knowing that what they're going through is completely normal.

If I had known what cluster feeding truly entailed; if I had known that it was okay for me to not instantly bond with my son; if I had known that 15% of pregnant women encounter a life-threatening complication, I would have been empowered, and I would not have felt nearly as depressed as I did early on. Granted, some of my ignorance is on me, as the information is all available online. But I bought books and read them, thinking that they'd make me educated, and they only gave me half the picture, and I trusted my doctors and midwives, and they also only gave me half the picture.

Man, I'm bitter about it. It's so crazy to me because it's something I wanted and I'm so happy when my little guy smiles and giggles at me. But I almost died and no one seems to give a shit.

I give a shit if the anonymous word of a stranger on the internet is any help. I've seen what my friends have went through and both pregnancy and motherhood look gruelling.

If I'd nearly died during childbirth I'd be an utter mess. You're coping incredibly well from my perspective and you should be proud of yourself for getting through all this stuff.

Well, I see and understand both sides of the picture. Midwives benefit from publicizing the happiest, most natural, most "beautiful" picture of birth that they can because it increases patronage and increases the chances of that actually being their client's experience. Physicians are limited professionally because angry patients are not complicit patients, and the very last thing you want to do is to have an expectant mother who doesn't trust your judgement.

I really think the best thing to do would be to treat birth like any other huge, traumatic surgical procedure and have before and after psychological consultations. Let a psychiatrist be the one to educate about hard truths if a patient is experiencing them or even if they might experience them.

But then I've also said for years that all physicians should have mandatory psych training and only now is that starting to become a partial reality. ...At least it's starting to change?

Also, fuck the Mommy cult. It's so toxic that I and the SO don't have kids and we've already decided not to be friends with parents if we ever do. Present company excluded, of course. :)

Oh man, I somehow missed this.

You make a good point about the limitations placed on and faced by professionals. And I think you're spot-on re: psychological consultations. I consider myself lucky in that both the practice I go to and the practice I take my son to actively monitor for PPD, but more could definitely be done.

There's got to be a change in the wider culture, in how we approach the entire process as a whole. I have a good friend who gave birth 4 months before me and, despite our closeness and despite the fact that she normally has a low tolerance for bullshit, she edited the nature of her experience. And she didn't even realize she was doing it until after the fact! There's a narrative, and it's strong as hell, and we all feel compelled to perpetuate it.

As for the rest, man, I don't blame you. The only friends I have who are parents are either those whom I knew before they had kids, or those whom you don't know are parents until someone asks.

I hear the same thing from my bff about birth and everything else. She got some pretty disgusting comments from a mother's group on facebook about feeding formula, even though she couldn't breastfeed for medical reasons. That really pissed me off.

Just this attitude about what is right and wrong about every decision and moment of pregnancy and birth and caring for a baby is really not okay. Even having negative thoughts seems worthy of punishment to some people.

I wish sex ed in schools did a better job about educating for reality rather than marriage -> problem-free pregnancy -> happy life. We don't ever really talk about miscarriage rates, delivery complications, etc.
Considering some teenagers will experience these things with unplanned pregnancy, they're not made aware of them until they're already pregnant, which isn't a thing that should be happening in this century.

Your feelings are completely valid and healthy, is what I'm saying. Everyone has their own experience and nobody should feel like they can't talk or seek support from other people.

Breastfeeding vs. formula pisses me right the fuck off. I'm breastfeeding, and it works for me, and now that I'm five months in, it's super easy. But not everyone can breastfeed, and not everyone wants to breastfeed, and we've come far enough along that formula is nutritionally equivalent to breast milk. Fed is best, full stop.

I wish sex ed in schools was better about preparing people, as well. I wish doctors were better about preparing people. I wish society in general was better about preparing people. I wish it was okay to say, "bringing a new life into this world is neat, and watching a new human develop is cool, but you're gonna fucking hate it and wanna be somewhere else at times, and you may not feel attached to your kid for two or three months."

Blah, I dunno. I just agree with you.

Yes to all of that. Yes.

I really don't like how unimportant recovery is perceived to be for new mothers, too. My friend called me crying because her family left her by herself and she couldn't hold the baby for very long because she was so sore and she felt like she was doing the wrong thing by the baby and I was like, oh my god woman. Get back in bed. You'd better be in that bed when I get there.
God forbid you should not leap up from the hospital bed ready to do everything yourself the very day you pop out the kid.
Any other medical procedure, and people would be like "get lots of rest!" but if it's childbirth it's more like "get up and do all the things!".

I dislike the idea that deviating from the ideal image of motherhood makes you a bad person or woman or mother.

I think women who don't feel happy all the time, with that supreme unconditional love thing and sense of being finally complete, are feeling a little more free to say so--I just ran into a rant on Scarymommy that I think you might like.

http://www.scarymommy.com/motherhood-myth/

Dear god, this. I have a daughter, and of course I adore her, but almost everything about the pregnancy/birth/newborn phase was fucking garbage and nearly sent me over the edge.

I also have very few friends who are mothers, for the same reasons as you. Anyone that refers to themselves as a Mommy scare me too much to deal with in my life. I honestly wonder sometimes if they're being happy at people, one-upping each other, in a desperate attempt to deny the truth of everything they're feeling.

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