They Should've Warned Me Not to Read The Huffington Post

Here's a very sweet and earnest blog from The Huffington Post that's making the rounds today, and I must say it's pretty amazeballs.

Far be it for me to cynically hate on anyone else's blog, since Lord knows my blog brings the hate like no other, and rightfully so. But this particular post cries out for a retort. 

The gist of it is that when this young, sexy, fit, yoga teacher named Jenny who takes lots of selfies was pregnant, the whole world warned her that having a newborn would be hard and horrible. Well, joke's on them, 'cause they were all wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Yeah, she's tired, but she's happy. VERY happy. She wants you to know how very happy she is. But most of all, she wants you to know how wrong everyone else was. Her baby is perfect. She has a rock the size of the Hope Diamond on her finger. Her husband wants to fuck her brains out (as evidenced by the picture of them kissing). And she fits back into her jeans after six weeks: ("They should've warned me ... that my body would actually fit back into my jeans in six weeks, but that I would be way too comfy in leggings to bother with actual pants."). 

She especially wants you to know that six-week thing. Like, a lot.

Well ... count me among the haters who failed to "cherish the soft quietness of the whole world, cat at my feet and baby nursing in my lap and cry because these days are fleeting." First of all, I am deathly allergic to cats and I hate them more than anything that draws breath on earth. Second, I did cry, but not because the days were fleeting. To the contrary, I cried because the days and nights were interminable; my tits looked and felt like they'd gone through a meat grinder; and I was so deliriously tired that often when I'd nurse at night, I'd doze off only to wake with a terrified start, thinking my baby was lost in the woods somewhere, when in fact he or she was half asleep and still latched onto my boob.

I'm happy for Jenny that her "heart shatter[ed] onto the floor" and melted like "molten lava" when she first met her baby and heard her husband cooing to the baby. By way of comparison, though, I'd be lying if I didn't confess that the only thing that shattered on the floor in my house was a plate of fried rice I dropped, and it made me cry. Just like everything else. 

Also, I think I left a plastic Tupperware on the stove by mistake. That melted like molten lava.  

We all love our babies, but some of us (like me) loved them with more terror and less inner peace. My main memories of mothering newborn babies are that I was afraid they were about to stop breathing at any second, and preparing to leave the house for an afternoon felt like blasting off to the moon on a mission for NASA. 

I also recall that I was still bleeding into my granny panties two months post-partum, and that at least with my daughter, I didn't shit for two weeks, and when I finally did, it was so terrifying that my mom had to sit there and constipation-doula me through the experience and I was screaming and crying and it was even worse than giving birth (if that is possible) and, according to my mother, she had "never seen anything like it, not even in medical school."

So, why didn't anyone warn me about that?