1. No one cares that you had a gorgeous, perfect, brilliant and often hilarious baby. And I do mean no one. I went to the grocery store alone a couple of weeks after the baby was born, and I expected everyone to stop me and say, "wait! weren't you just pregnant? did you have a perfect little baby and doesn't it feel weird to be away from him? congratulations and kiss him!!" No one did. In that situation, my expectations were probably a little unrealistic. However, I did think I had the community support of a day care that my employer claimed to be helping me get into, and that never worked out, and no one explained to me why it didn't work out even though babies around me younger than mine keep getting in. Also, no one except the baby's other parent wants to hear stories about the baby, and in fact often people want to spend about 5 minutes cooing over the baby and then they are done, and it's actually a bit jarring to realize that you are responsible 24/7, and this seemingly helpful person is now nowhere to be found. Some people, who perhaps you felt close to before the baby, do not even want those 5 minutes and do not check in with you. Also, when you feel alone and isolated, no one really cares about that either. The upside to no one caring about your baby's specialness comes when you deal with kind doctors and nurses who can draw from experience and assure you that some tiny little thing is perfectly normal, and this part of not being special should not be underestimated.
2. The world treats women who have just given birth barbarically. Please promise me that the next fool you hear railing against gay marriage or whatever gets an earful from you about how if they are so committed to "family values," they will work and vote for sane and civilized maternity policies in this country. This will go much, much, much farther in forwarding family values than preventing two adults who love each other from getting married will. Also, post-partum depression may well be a real thing, but shoving everything that is hard about having a new baby onto the mother and calling her diseased in some way completely ignores all the real difficulties associated with having a baby: all the relationships that need to be re-negotiated, the time that needs to be managed, the exhaustion, the work that needs to be balanced, the day care that never comes through, the people who don't understand what kind of help or company you need (and your not knowing that either), etc., etc. These have real effects and those effects are not the result of the mother being crazy or pathological.
3. Exhaustion ain't just a river in Egypt. My partner and I treated having a new baby as though it were like going to war. We practically did drills. We froze food, and laundered clothes and counted diapers and put together cribs and had a dog sitter on call, etc., etc. And we still weren't ready. You know how Eskimos have a couple of dozen words for all the different kinds of snow they encounter? Well, new parents could probably drum up a lot of different kinds of tiredness, related to body or mind and different tasks that you can do while being a certain kind of tired, etc. About two weeks after the baby was born, all I wanted more than anything in the entire world was for someone to take over just for about 14 or 15 hours so I could go to a hotel and sleep for that entire time. I wanted that more than I've ever wanted anything. And that was a different kind of tired than I am now, when my now-toddler fusses at 1 a.m., waking me from a deep sleep for about 15 minutes, and then wakes up for his day at 6:30 after I stayed up too late because I was enjoying some time alone. If some kinds of childbirth are all about your relationship to pain, having the baby is all about your relationship to sleep. Everyone's got a different one.
And you know what? Having a baby is really incredibly great. But pretending like it's not incredibly difficult makes the hard parts harder and makes the good parts less genuinely good.
Breed away!
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