Posts Tagged ‘MOMents’

A week after giving birth to my first child, a 6 lbs 1 oz baby girl through almost twelve hours of labor and by normal delivery, I am finding that the hardships of being a new mother is not limited to taking care of the baby but also encompasses dealing with family members.

In the week past I have come to think that most family members insist on seeing the baby for reasons other than welcoming the new little human being into this world. They come on personal selfish reasons.

There is the “I wanted a baby girl too but just couldn’t have one” kind. There is the “I just want to know from whom it takes after” kind. There is also the “I want to see what see as many faults as possible in the baby because it will make me feel better about myself” kind.

Why does it matter from whom the baby takes after? Or isn’t there anything else worth talking about? Doesn’t the mother also need some respect and consideration?

I know I made it clear that I didn’t want any visitors during the first week. We as a couple need that first week to adjust as new parents. We need that time to adjust to our new roles, our new responsibilities, our new way of living our day to day lives. We need that time to attune ourselves to the new family member’s needs as well as attend to ours.

I have just given birth. I have stitches from the episiotomy. The wound is in the process of healing and is painful. I am still bleeding and will still be in the next weeks. My pelvic bone and my uterus have to go back to their pre-pregnancy state. I am breastfeeding and my breasts are engorged and painful, and my back hurts. I am in pain. It’s hard to walk, to sit, to lie down, to sleep, to rest and to do everything else. I even have to have someone help me out in putting clothes on. I am aware that compared with other women who have given birth, I am in less pain just because my delivery did not require forceps or a vacuum, nor was it caesarian. It is still pain nonetheless.

I know we cannot turn away visitors, especially because they are family. We welcome visitors because we also need and appreciate any help, any advice, any tips we can get. We are first time mom and dad.

But comments like “Maitim tong baby na to..” and “Si ganyan nung ka-edad nya ganito…” Why compare? To me, all babies look the same anyway. And then after that stage, every human being, every individual is unique. I do not care if her skin is fair or not. I plan to make a little surfer girl out of my daughter and if that turns out to be the case, no one will know what her real skin color is. Like me. I have heard time and again the statement, “Maputi ka pala.” I heard it from my college blockmates after I stopped a semester-long twice-a-week swim in the university pool. I heard it from my co-teachers and new friends I made in Manila a few months getting back from El Nido, after a year of being out in the sun everyday and every weekend from beach to beach and island to island. I heard it from friends after I got pregnant and had to stop surfing. No one in my family is dark-skinned. I being of Spanish descent is yellow-skinned and freckled as are my aunts, uncles and cousins on my mother’s side. In my family, I can be considered the least fair-skinned. So if the baby turns out to be “hindi maputi” that’s not my fault. Then again, if my daughter thinks she wants fairer skin, there is always glutathione and the likes, or all those papaya products. Enough said.

I know the baby does not look like me. My father said so himself. So I do not take kindly to any comments from my husband’s family members about her looks. Parang ang yabang naman, akala mo sobrang gaganda at gagwapo nila sa pamilya. Magbilangan pa kami ng mga gwapo at magaganda sa pamilya at makikitang lamang ang pamilya ko nang bonggang-bongga.

I was really angry. No one has the right to ridicule my child and I certainly will not take it from someone in the family circle.

It seems only right to request that visits not be done until a week or two after the baby is born. The baby does nothing but eat, pee, poop and sleep… and sleep… and sleep. It doesn’t seem right to wake the baby up just so you can take pictures of it with her eyes wide open and it is wrong to take pictures of the baby when she has her eyes wide open and use the camera’s flash. It doesn’t seem right to expect the baby to be photogenic or to smile for your picture or your video. The poor baby can’t even see yet.

***

I read and re-read what I wrote above, thought about it for three days and wrote and rewrote. I really just wanted to vent out.

I thought about how angry I was as I was looking at my daughter’s face, sleeping peacefully in my arms. I could spend hours just looking at her, all in love. When I wake up in the middle of the night to feed her, I look at her all bathed in the green night light and fall asleep smiling, thinking about how lovely she is. I spend hours looking, trying to memorize the various expressions her face makes, knowing that time goes by quickly and she will not be this lovely baby forever. I want to remember all of it. I carried her with me everywhere, had lots of joy, amusement and pain with her the past nine or so months and I do not have to care what people say. It does not matter what she looks like, or who she takes after. This baby is mine, made with and in love, and I will love her no matter what she looks like or what she will become. She can be anything and I will love her with all my heart.

It doesn’t matter. I will not let these things affect me. I cannot. I will remind myself every time people say something about my baby’s looks. There will always be comments about the eyes, the eyelashes, the nose, the lips, the eye color, the hair color, the skin color and I will remember to not hear. Every son and daughter will always be the most beautiful in every mother’s eyes. It wasn’t easy being pregnant, it wasn’t easy giving birth and it won’t be easy being a mom, to a baby, to a toddler, to a grade-schooler, to a teenager and to an adult but there will always be love.

I have proven that love makes us blind. Now I know love also makes us deaf.

Written April 15, 2009

Originally posted here.

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Okay lang yan, masaya naman siya eh. Ansaya-saya!

This past week has been very, physically and emotionally, exhausting for me. A lot of things happened this week. For some of the important occurrences, one could say, “I saw it coming.”

Ryan going out on a business trip is not something new. He has been going for years. What is different is now we have a baby. I used to not mind his going away. It meant I was going away too. If he was going on 20th for example, I’d book a flight somewhere for 19th and make him drive me to the airport. If he was coming back on the 29th, I’d book mine for 30th and make him pick me up at the airport. Now I can’t go anywhere because I can’t bring the baby to other places just like that, especially by myself. So I stay home.

Staying home in an apartment by yourself, to take care of your seven-month old baby all on your own, without any help from any other family member on any or both sides, and with an insensitive and inconsiderate maid who sleeps earlier and wakes up later than you do is not easy.

Friday I finally snapped my thinning patience and yelled at the maid who instantly packed her things. When it comes to maids (even if I have only had one of my own in my entire life.. the ones my parents had over at our house through all the years of course do not count) I am never one to say or ask, “No, don’t go.” In fact, so enraged was I that  I even had the urge to throw her bags out my gate. An urge quelled by other things of course.

So harassed and exhausted was I that I made a distraught call to the husband who was in the middle of a crazy “Black Friday” sale to tell him that if I had wanted to become nothing more than a housewife, I wouldn’t have taken up graduate studies. That if I had wanted to be a single mother, I would have just gone home to my parents or back to El Nido where I could have a real job and I would be surrounded by a lot of people all the time that I never have to spend a single day taking care of a baby all on my own and nary a person to practice my social and communication skills with.

A hysterical me found myself asking when is it exactly that I would be able to rest? When was the last time I could say I have had a good night’s sleep? I haven’t had a real straight sleep in seven months. I haven’t had a real ME-time in seven months. I keep saying I need to go to the spa for a good massage perhaps but I don’t ever make it. Taking care of a baby, though tremendously rewarding, is also exceptionally tiring. My back used to hurt because I breastfed all through the day and all through the night even as I slept. Now my back hurts because I have to carry around a 20-pound baby. I keep saying one day I’m gonna make it out of the city by myself and have some me-time in some beach in some island somewhere even for a day or two. Just like old times. But I never make it. I cannot be away from my daughter for long periods of time. Not because she demands it, but because I just can’t. I keep wishing I could but I just can’t.

A lot of things is going on right now and I post happy stuff in this site because after all, I want to project that I am living high and taking it easy. One would think my life does not have any privacy at all since I seem to blog all the time, but you would never know what really goes on in my life and I will not tell you either.

Today I was rewarded for all my efforts and hard work with a lot of things I have so wanted. Yes, things. I finally got a Sanuk sandals and a Bamboo tablet. I even got a Nine West sunglasses (which is going to be handy this weekend when we go to Bohol). Ryan finally got himself a point and shoot camera he has been wanting to have for months since he finds it tedious to keep lugging his heavy Nikon D80 around on business trips. That being said, the Nikon D80 is officially mine. Well, it has been mine for some time. The 50mm f.18 lens is mine. I keep thinking of selling my Olmpus E-500 since we hardly use it but I looked at it online to see how much it sells these days and it’s still at about $1000 with used selling from $400 and above. It has not lowered its price that much. I especially love the 40-150mm lens on it and I have a hard time parting with it. Maybe  I won’t.. but what is it gonna be there for?

Ryan even got me a balloon animals book and kit! A few months ago I saw an episode of MOMents where they featured a mom who made balloon decorations as a business on the side and I was sort of envious. No I did not want to put a balloon business but I wanted to be able to make balloon decorations too. We saw a kit at Shopwise once when we were shopping for book shelves but I did not really buy the kit. Ryan said when we were chatting on YM when he was there, “I got you something you at some time expressed a passing interest in,” and I wondered what that was. It seems to me I express passing interest in almost everything and anything, even the most mundane.

I am excited about making little balloon dogs and gators with Lia one of these days.

I am still tired. I am still in need of a good massage. I look at what I have now and I can’t say I’m not happy though. I have to be. These are good things. Some days we get the things we want but not the things we need. Still, is that not something to be thankful for? We know money can’t buy happiness but at least it makes up for some real hard time you have had to and will endure. I deserve these things too I guess. To mask the pain I have in my heart and soothe the pain on my back.

These are photos taken by my friend Cheekay when they visited Lia and me at the apartment. Love these photos! They are too cute!

I tried to put her on my shoulders and she was too heavy. Hahaha! I love this photo because it reminds me of a mother going down the mountains to sell her wares or produce (like vegetables) in town. I am soo rural like that! Or maybe rice… 8.5 kilos of rice.

That’s her new thing these days. The rest-my-head-or-cheek-on-any-part-of-your-body thing. What a sweet little thing… Also, a shiny face is still a shiny face, skin smoothening effect or not!

This is Angku the doting mom.

These photos just inspired me too much that I even learned how to use Photoshop. Hahaha!

This is where I learned how to add more depth of field and this is where I learned how to do that skin smoothening effect. And I thought I would never learn!!! Thanks Cheekay and thank you tutorials.

I had been working on a thought for some time now. I had been slowly processing my thoughts and feelings so that they would come out right. Maybe I will get to process out my thoughts and I would get to write them down in a coherent way some time. For now, this poem just about sums it up.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

– Kahlil Gibran

***

Lia my daughter, though we may be inseparable now, though you are completely dependent on me now, there will come a time when you will let me go and we will go on to live our own separate lives.

Although you came from me, you are not mine, you are you and you are yours alone.