Frozen Poop Savers: Where Are You??

We all have our gifts. Some of us play musical instruments. Some of us have a profound understanding of the stock market. Some of us have 20/20 vision and straight teeth. I am a gifted complainer. I could never be in the Complaining Olympics because I went pro as a child. I am not, however, a moper. There is a distinction between a complainer and a moper that is not unlike the distinction between Godiva chocolate and the cheap stuff with the powdery white film all over it that the elderly people on the corner gave out to trick or treaters last October. Mopers are complaining wannabes. These are people with a low threshold for discomfort and bad attitudes. They often feel the world is against them and whine about it ad nauseum…our nauseum. Complainers, on the other hand, are a different sort and depending on their level of skill can actually relieve themselves of their terrible burdens without making their audience feel anxious, sympathetic, and/or bored. As a gifted complainer, most people leave my circle of complaint without feeling as though they’ve witnessed a series of moans and groans, but pleasantly entertained.

Because nothing about pregnancy and working-motherhood came easy for me, I saw this as an opportunity to hone my complaining skills to an even finer point. I had virtually every pregnancy symptom in the book. Fatigue? Check. Morning sickness? Check. (Morning sickness, by the way, is a misnomer. It can occur at any time and, in my case, last around the clock for months on end.) Growing a third nipple? Okay, I have to admit that I did not have that one, though one of the pregnancy books I read warned me that it was a possibility. Again, I can thank my past life martyrdom for dodging that bullet. Still, I found pregnancy to emphatically not be the rosy glow and increased energy level that other women I knew lied about…er, boasted of. In this way, I suppose I might consider my itchy blue-veined belly, patchy skin, protruding navel, prematurely leaky breasts, and clinical constipation to be a rehearsal of sorts. But nothing could top working-motherhood for complainability. Nothing.

“Motherhood is natural. You and your child will immediately bond. Just as a mother bird intuitively knows to provide nourishment to her hatchlings, there is a mother’s instinct that kicks in once you and your baby become acquainted.”
--Lies. All lies.

Because everyone lies about pregnancy and parenting, I’m going to defy tradition and tell the raw, unfettered truth: There is nothing natural about working-motherhood. Try telling a new working-mother how natural motherhood is when her nipples are being sucked into the shape of elongated sausage links as she presses her breasts into a wheezing electric breast pump praying that she’ll be able to get at least four ounces out so her husband can take over one night feeding and she can get a full two hours of uninterrupted sleep in order to report to work the next morning looking only recently deceased.

Wait. I take that back. Working-motherhood is natural. It is natural in the way that camping is natural. It is natural in the way that roughing it out on the bare forest floor, surrounded by strange sounds and wild beasts is natural. It is natural in the way that the reality show Survivor is natural. That is to say, you will survive, but you will occasionally be reduced to an animal-like state: you will eat anything, you will quickly lose any concern about your appearance, and squabbles induced by lack of sleep and food will inevitably crop up leading you and your spouse to seriously consider who should be booted off the island.

I am not a camper. Neither is my husband. We are fond of saying that our idea of camping is a Hilton with no room service. In short, we like convenience. We quickly learned that there is nothing about new parenthood that is convenient. In fact, little conveniences we previously took for granted were lost to us. Conveniences like being able to go to the bathroom at one’s leisure, taking a shower, finding time to brush one’s teeth—tops and bottoms—in one session, shaving both legs on the same day, eating an entire meal without having to leave the table numerous times. Gone, all gone.

My gifted complaining skills, honed to a fine point during pregnancy, began to suffer when I returned to work after my much, much, much too short maternity leave. I blame this on sleep deprivation. It hurts me to say this, but I became…a moper. And you know what I quickly learned? The world turns a deaf ear to the struggling new parent moper. Remember all those friends and family members whose eyes got all soft at the mention of babies and asked Scott and me when we were going to finally settle down with a family? Know where they were at three in the morning when our baby had been screaming for two hours? They were showered, hairless, with clean teeth and asleep in their nice, soft beds. In short, they got the last room at the inn while Scott and I were roughing it in a lean-to outside and they weren’t even willing to allow us the use of their inside toilet. Oh sure, people would drop by (often unexpectedly ringing the doorbell during the precious few minutes of quiet when the baby would finally drop off to sleep in the evening and I was just beginning to fantasize about the possibility of washing my dirty hair, leading the dog to jump into a fit of barking which woke the baby prompting the uninvited visitor to say something like, “Oh, I see I came at a bad time! Let me just take a peek at the little bundle. My, what a set of lungs he has! I’ll just leave this receiving blanket gift with you and be on my way. Ta-ta!”), but they rarely provided any real help or comfort. No one offered to go to the store for me or make me a cup of tea. In fact, it was usually the opposite. Well fed, washed, and hydrated relatives would breeze in and jiggle the baby until he made some sort of response in protest while telling me to fetch them a drink (“Just a little diet something with crushed ice and a twist of lemon. I got a little parched on the drive over here. Oh, and some cookies would be nice. I had an early lunch. Cootchie, cootchie, coo!”). In fact, even the gifts they brought by like a ticket of admittance to see a show were often useless. While everyone thinks to bring a receiving blanket --leaving the new parents with enough little swatches of fleece to quilt together a couple of car covers-- no one gets you diapers, wipes, or diaper rash cream. Heck, some take-out and a bottle of wine would have been nice! While only a few short weeks before I was a minor celebrity getting free biscotti, now I was a has-been. This must be what child stars feel like after their series is cancelled.

Oh, and while these visitors flopped my baby around, they often spouted strange advice and warned me of rare potential hazards around my home. This is just what I needed for I’d found that my slight neurosis genetically passed on to me from my mother had become full blown in the days following my son’s birth. No longer did I just think I was suffering from every ailment, now I was certain my child had the ailment, too. I agonized over whether my son’s circumcision had been performed correctly (Didn’t it look a little too raw? Did they take too much off in the hospital? If so, can they sew some of it back on?), whether his belly button was infected (Is it supposed to be that color?), and whether his poop was the right shade or not.

This last bit requires a bit of explaining. While at the hospital, the pediatrician off-handedly told Scott to expect our baby’s droppings to change color and consistency over the first few days and weeks of life. That was all our frantic new parent minds needed to go off the deep end. All of my previous angst over my own bowel movements transferred directly to my child’s. After every diaper change, Scott and I would huddle together and inspect the results. Was it the right hue and texture? What about volume? There seemed to be no detectable odor. Was this a concern? And if so, does this indicate a problem within our son’s bowel or with our olfactory senses?

My pediatrician tells the story of one couple who actually saved the first two weeks of their child’s diapers in individually labeled zip lock bags they stored in the freezer and brought to the doctor’s office for color and consistency inspection, much to my pediatrician’s dismay. Scott and I were not that bad…but we were close. I know the torturous anxiety that Scott and I went through over our baby’s poop, so I simply cannot make fun of that pair. My heart goes out to you, frozen poop savers, wherever you are.