the lost weeks

I’ve been off sugar for a month and I’ve lost 21.5 pounds. :)

Strangely, 18.5 of that has been in the past week. Even more strangely: I have never in my life been less interested in sweets. I’m having a hard time eating enough anyway, due to sheer exhaustion, but wow, really honestly just not interested in junk. Who am I and what have I done with my tastebuds?

Mom was telling me she was reading about post-partum exhaustion, which apparently affects 80% of new mothers. Not depression, just flat-out exhaustion. That’s where I am. I’m not depressed, I’m just too goddamned tired to do anything but sleep, eat, and feed Henry. Thank God for Ted, who is keeping everything together. He has become a master diaper changer, and is much better at changing Henry’s clothes than I am. He has been keeping me fed, and doing laundry by the boatload, and keeping the kitchen pretty clean, and generally being the most magnificent husband ever. I’m a mess anyway, but I’d be completely non-functional without him.

Um. Being a novelist, it is of course my inclination to write up a detailed account of the past two weeks. Being exhausted, I’m not sure I’ll actually manage that. The short version of the actual labor process is Ted said, “I’d rather have a limb removed.” I think he meant without anesthesia.

The slightly longer version is I apparently had one of those nightmare labors women scare other women with, although I really didn’t think of it that way until it was revealed that my sister, who is slightly more fit than God, had no idea how I’d endured it all. Actually, I still am not thinking of it that way, except I’m impressed with myself for having impressed Deirdre. It’s just sort of how it was. Anyway, I started having contractions the evening of Thursday the 22nd (the actual due date), more or less didn’t sleep the next few nights, my water broke at 7:30am Monday the 26th, we spent the day at the hospital where I dilated only very, very slowly, they put me on a pitocin drip around 6 or 7pm, ratcheted it up to full over the course of the next few hours (during which time the delivering doctor wandered by and said, more or less, “Jesus but she’s got a high pain tolerance,” only with an Indian accent and phrasing), and I finally had a baby at 2:41am on Tuesday the 27th.

Mom, cheerfully, said, “The good thing about that kind of labor is it makes the next time you do it seem like a breeze!” I said, “Next time?” and she claimed I’ve said something about ‘next time’ several times already. I have no recollection of this at all. :) In fact, I have very little recollection of a whole lot of the past two weeks, and am impressed I’ve managed to write this much up. Now I’m going to go eat.