Surprise: I have a baby girl!
Elena Sophia Newton arrived on September 9th at 5:26 PM.
Sorry to keep you in the dark. I planned to announce the pregnancy earlier in the year, but preparing for life with a baby got in the way.
I don’t know what to say about the birth experience yet. I’m writing on it over time but I don’t have anything that feels close to done. Until then, chew on this:
Did you know you and I had to learn how to poop?
I didn’t. I suspect anyone who hasn’t had a child doesn’t know either. A week or so after her birth, my daughter began groaning, grunting, twisting, and shuddering seemingly out of nowhere. I became concerned she was having some kind of intense acid reflux or something.
Nope–just learning how to poop.
Babies think, when they need to pass gas or have a bowel movement, they should clench all their muscles and push. There’s one issue with this approach–the sphincter of the anus needs to be relaxed so gas and poop can come out.
My daughter has no idea you can both tense and relax at the same time. What’s crazier is how long it takes for her to figure it out–up to two to three months!
Can you imagine having to wait that long to learn how to perform one of the body’s basic functions? It’s insane to me. I’ve taken it for granted that we simply know how to do things like this.
But we don’t; we have to learn them.
My daughter shows me how much I take for granted. When they say babies are helpless, they mean it. They’re hardly even functional by the time they arrive on the scene. I feel like the checklist for the baby product launch was: can breathe, eat, sleep, and occasionally poop.
It’s a pretty damn low bar to meet. But then you realize they eat, but not that great. They still have to learn how to use all the parts of their mouth to latch and suck properly. How well they sleep is a roll of the dice (my daughter sleeps pretty well, thank God). As for pooping, I guess the engineers ran out of time to ship that feature? Come on.
It’s stressful, watching her. Listening to her strained grunts and cries lights up every nerve ending in my body. As a parent, I’m convinced she’s in pain. Everything I’ve read and heard from her doctor suggests it’s not. It still bothers me, though. I sometimes put on headphones or go for a walk (if I’m not on daddy duty) because it causes me pain to watch her go through this phase.
I guess this is what it means to be a parent: to watch your own flesh and blood struggle and stumble to find their way in the world while knowing you can do nothing to prevent the pain and strife that goes along with it.
I’ve never felt so helpless. However, there is a silver lining–I know I’m going to need this experience when the struggles are less mundane and far more dramatic.
I can laugh about learning to poop. Will I laugh when things get more severe? If she falls, gets hurt, fails at something, or has her heart broken? All of these things must happen to her; to try and stop them would stunt her growth.
I know it won't always be easy, but I'm confident she'll figure it out. For now, I’m excited for the day I find she made a poopy diaper without fighting for it.
I guess this is my life now.