I don't know why this didn't occur to me before. Let's blame it on the sleep deprivation and hormones, shall we?
Nearly all my anxieties about having a baby centered around physical stuff--long ago I feared labor, but reading about epidurals helped me in that respect. I worried, vainly, about having a very saggy stomach and lots of stretch marks, about my breasts being transformed in a most unpleasant way by nursing. The nonphysical stuff I thought about--no more weekends reading the NY Times for hours on end, not being able to decide to go to a matinee with S on the spur of the moment, stuff like that. I knew what I was in for in terms of that kind of sacrifice, and I was down with it, so to speak.
Turns out the physical stuff hasn't been that big of a deal. My body weathered the pregnancy and birth pretty well (And at nearly 39, the glory days of ye olde rack are over, so whatever changes nursing is causing aren't worth worrying about.)
But the mental stuff is a different story. I am still fine with the sacrifices and financial struggles and all that. I know I've written about this a lot, but what's blindsided me is the painful burden of my attachment to my child. All that fretting about physical stuff and silly me didn't have an inkling of how the emotional stuff overshadows the physical. I am smart, aware, and consider myself to be semi on top of most things psychological. So why the hell didn't I worry about the things that are truly hard?
Why don't the baby books focus more on the emotions? I swear that everything I read was like this: pregnancy is hard, childbirth hurts, but then your baby comes out and it's love at first sight. You won't get much sleep, and you won't have much sex, but it's all worth it.
I'm fine, mostly, with little sleep--though one could argue that my sometimes fragile emotional state is a result of fragmented sleep. I can handle the physical. I wasn't completely and uncomplicatedly in love right away, but my god I am now. Everything I was told was hard hasn't been, and I feel like there are these other surprises, things I never read about.
It's painful to be so attached to someone--I've known this, and it's partially why I was single for so long (the whole thing of not wanting one's eggs in one basket). But I didn't know this kind of pain. It's an exquisite, precious thing--but the depth of love and protectiveness is overwhelming. It's an unbidden attachment that I will never be free of, and that's a wonderful and terrible thing.
