Whose Idea Was This, Anyway?! - From Sara Leib

In honor of Christianne’s maternity leave we asked some of our favorite people to share stories from "the fourth trimester," the period between birth and 12 weeks postpartum during which your baby (or the baby you care for) is adjusting to the world and you're adjusting to your baby. Today Sara Leib, singer, voice teacher and founder of Voice Studio LA is talking about her experience becoming a mother and the monumental shifts that change your life forever after bringing your baby home.

“Can’t we just stuff her back in for a few hours so I can get some sleep?!” These were the words I was sputtering through my sobs, referring to the baby of course, on my cell phone in secret to my dear friend, whom I had called, panicked, while lost in a maze of corridors in the hospital where my infant had been born two nights before. It was time to be released, to go home, back to the life I had previously thought was my own. To the house I called mine, the bed I slept in, the ego I’d developed over thirty-two years, the teetering sense of self (loathing) I’d always held. I’d had to find the car in the parking lot and bring in the infant car seat, because hospitals rightly won’t release newborns without proof that they have a safe ride home. I’d had trouble finding my way there, and now on my way back I was on the wrong floor. Or wing. It all looked the same in my sorry state, and I didn’t want my wife to know how exhausted I was, or how insane the thoughts I was having were. On the phone, my friend couldn’t understand what I was trying to say through my cry-constricted larynx. I hadn’t slept much in three nights, unless you count the 2 hours in between nurse visits. I was, frankly, a mess, and my dear friend who had moved five hundred miles away a couple of years before, was trying to calm me down. Her voice was sweet, and she was trying to find comforting words, and said something like, “I think this is how it’s going to be for a little while. You’ll make it through, and it won’t be like this forever”. But to me, through my fear-stricken eyes, it was reading much more like, “This is the choice you made. And now you’re stuck with it”. I’d agreed to marry my wife and to take her shit, but I was unaware somehow, so selfishly, that having a child meant my life was no longer my own. And my wife’s life wasn’t mine anymore, either.

 This friend is a few years my senior, and I generally consider her slightly wiser, funnier, and better-looking than I. Her stories are always hilarious, her anecdotes full of depth, her advice always sage. I can’t remember if I knew it then, but she was trying to get pregnant at the time, and thinking back on it, I can’t imagine my freakout was making her more confident about what was to come for her. She talked me down for a little while longer before suggesting that I’d been gone for quite a while, and should probably find my way back. I wiped my eyes, slowed my breathing, thanked her, hung up, and asked a security guard for help directing me to the right hospital room. I found the room, and it’s possible that my wife would never have known I’d gotten so lost had I not told her. She'd have just assumed I’d popped into the cafeteria for some soup (that is totally something I would do).

I had never wanted to carry a baby myself. It just did not seem particularly attractive an idea to put my body through that, what with my extra sensitive musician right brained, anxiety ridden, depressive, Prozac-taking, self. Not to mention my sensitive breasts. Ugh. Carrying a baby sounded like it would be a nightmare for me that would have me end up in a psych ward for smothering it so I could sleep. So when I was seriously dating a pediatric nurse with the most caring, calm, anxiety-less demeanor--the exact opposite of mine-- it seemed a perfect parenting partnership. She also wanted a kid and didn’t seem to mind the idea of her boobs hanging low, so the choice to have her carry was obvious. We had started seriously considering having a child a few years after we’d gotten married, but we liked our lives so much, we decided to put it off for a year. My wife is no dummy. She takes care of babies for a living. She knew to expect to lose our social lives, our sleep, [our sex lives, but that’s a different story], and our sense of normalcy when we had a child. So when she suggested waiting a year because we loved so much going out to eat, traveling, wine tasting, and exploring our city, it was easy to go along with. Of course, as lesbians, we couldn't just have sex and make a baby (I tried. It didn’t work). So we opted for insemination. On the sixth try, she got pregnant, but miscarried basically as soon as we deplaned on a babymoon vacation to Bali (my idea, obviously) and we will forever be grateful for the great, affordable medical care she received on our street food stopover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Somehow (due to my wife’s superhuman nature, casual demeanor, and medical knowledge) we managed to have a great vacation despite the miscarriage, and decided to skip one month and then get right back into the insemination when we got home to Los Angeles. On what was going to be our eighth try, we had fully depleted the $10,000 we’d inherited with our privilege and set aside for babymaking, and lucky for us, the eighth one took.

Back home from the hospital, I found myself absolutely bewildered that billions of other women had successfully not killed their infants. My wife was producing milk, but we couldn’t get the damn stuff out. These breasts that had previously functioned pretty much for my own enjoyment were now off limits, attractively engorged with milk that didn’t seem to want to go anywhere. God is a salacious tease. Another friend grabbed her family, rushed over, sent her husband out for fenugreek pills, and showed me how to take my wife’s ginormous breast, squish it into a sandwich, and stuff the aereola into the baby’s face just so, so she could latch. It worked about twenty percent of the time, which was miraculously enough to get us through the first few days until we could see a lactation consultant.

After week at home, and I was in a far sadder state than in that scene in the hospital. I could have pretty well predicted how I’d behave in a particular situation. I knew my wife well enough that I could predict her behavior, too. What I hadn’t accounted for was that I had no way to predict what I would be like while suffering from sleep deprivation. There’s a reason that they use sleep deprivation as a form of torture. It’s fucking awful. My wife works at night--she was fairly used to not getting enough sleep. I, on the other hand, am a princess who makes her living singing, and since sleep is required for the body to properly function to sing, the only sleep I was used to losing was for an early flight. I really hadn’t seen an all nighter since undergrad, and that seemed like ancient history.

One afternoon, I was yawning and staring into space when I imagined the greatest feeling in the world would to be to run away, drive up the coast, get a hotel, and go to sleep. Maybe for a week or so. It dawned on me that this was why so many men left. They didn’t have a hormonal bond, they were exhausted, and this was all too much. I mentioned to my wife that I knew why so many men walked out on their families and admitted to her my fantasy. She calmly looked up from her tranquil couch perch holding our newborn and said, “You’re totally allowed to feel that way. You’re just not allowed to do it”. And that’s why I married her. ‘Whose ideas WAS this, anyway?!’ I didn’t say.

Feelings aside, this is what it looked like: My wife spent every waking moment feeding the baby, because the baby usually spat up most of what she very slowly ate. So feeding wasn’t every couple of hours. It was constant. One boob, other boob, spit up, baby screams with hunger, feed again. Half-heartedly watch a TV drama, feed again. Spit up, hungry cry, and back on the boobs. Aside from looking on, guilt-ridden and helpless, my job was to do the endless laundry that the spit up created, hold the baby so my wife could pee or shower, refill my wife’s water cup, and cook for us. The constant breastfeeding basically made my wife go from a super chill dairy cow to a wild-eyed, ravenously starving mom-beast in a span of about twenty minutes. Basically, this adorable little succubus was drinking the lifeblood out of my wife, gave me nothing in return (save for the torture), and to make matters worse, cried a fair amount. My wife seemed happy as a clam. Like she was born for the job. I’ve seen the woman come home after losing an infant patient. I saw her when her grandmother passed away. Nary a tear. But she would look in the baby’s eyes and her own would start to cry. She would carefully explain to me that what she was experiencing was hormonal, that it wasn’t post-partum depression, and she wasn’t going to throw the baby out the window. That was the line she used. As if I couldn’t tell from the positively gorgeous protective love glow she had all the time. It was starting to feel like when you’re grossed out by a lustful, in-love couple making out in public when you’re excruciatingly single. You know, like how Mary is always looking at baby Jesus in all those damn Renaissance paintings.

Life went on like this for about two weeks until my wife finally told me that it was sweet that I was getting up at night with her, but gently suggested that perhaps I’d be more helpful if I went back to sleeping with my usual earplugs at night so that during the day I could be more attentive to her. I was wholly relieved, if guilt-ridden, to oblige. This was only the beginning of the guilt. Guilt that I wasn't as helpful with the baby, guilt that I wasn’t useful. Guilt that I was getting more sleep than I deserved. If there was something to feel guilty about, I would. And if there was something to feel unnecessarily guilty about, I’d be all over that, too.

Five months into motherdom, my wife went back to work. She didn’t want to, of course. But, America. A night shift pediatric oncology nurse, tears would well in her eyes every time she left the house. The hormones and bond she and the baby had was irreplaceably special, and just thinking about leaving her baby’s presence pained her. I felt pained too, but because I didn’t want her to leave, knowing my fate. I would walk around the house rocking and bouncing, cooing, and singing to the baby who screamed for hours on end. I still have a voice memo of the screaming, just as a reminder. Yes, I was a mother, but I did not have mother’s scent, milk in my breasts, nor the speaking voice that had soothed my baby for the past five months, and nine months in utero before that. I’ll never forget the night a friend stopped by to see the baby and see how I was doing. The baby would just would not stop crying for a second, and my friend’s eyes looked like one of those surprised emojis. “Is it like this all the time?” her eyes begged. Yes, I nodded. Every. Single. Work. Night. We couldn’t even converse. She held the screaming baby for as long as she could stand. She hugged me hard before she left.

I try not to, but if we’re going to be heteronormative, basically I’m the dad. So I reached out to my dad friends for some emotional support. I had a few in particular who had children one or two years older than mine. They hadn't accidentally killed theirs, so to me they were basically professionals. “Ooph, that was a tough time”. Or, “I know. Screaming babies suck. I remember when mine was that age” was what they said. I had been hoping for, you know, a little more emotional vulnerability. “Yes! I feel you, Sar. It was hard for me, too. I just wanted to feel some fucking love and attention or to feel like I mattered, and had a hard time dealing with not getting that for a long time. The baby became the priority at all times and that was a super hard adjustment for me”, my brain begged the same dad who’d gone out for fenugreek supplements to say. Or maybe if my brothers weren’t in the mood for emotional vulnerability, something like an estimated date or ETA of when I’d get to feel wanted again, or when I could go out to dinner, would have sufficed. Six months? A year. Eighteen months! I’d have taken anything. I got nothing but cool, measured attempts at empathy.

And once the baby could walk? She could also climb, run, and jump. It was like she never stopped moving. Which meant I could never relax. I was resentful, and felt guilty all the time (apparently lesbianism does not save one from the perils of womanhood). As every mother has experienced, I felt guilty for not being home when I was at work, and pained that I wasn’t creative or productive enough when I was at home. I was just generally pretty unhappy. Getting up from a chair felt like the biggest chore. But I was always having to get up, to chase this baby, and eventually toddler, around. It felt like a never-ending hamster wheel, so when people asked when we were going to have a second child, one I could carry, I asked if they were out of their fucking minds and wondered why in the world anyone with half a brain would do such a thing.

It’s funny writing this, because my baby is now a very outgoing (like me) six-year-old rules follower (like her other mom) who can do no wrong in my eyes. I may have to discipline her once in a while, but she’s the most kind, brilliant, hilarious, gorgeous little person, and I could just listen to her muse about her dolls or whatever she’s conjured up in her sweet little imagination all day long. Her smile lights up my life, her voice slaps a grin on my face even after the most difficult day. She is the apple of my eye, the absolute greatest decision I’ve ever made, and I am in constant reverie that we made this wise, funny little chatterbox from specks of biowaste. Thinking about how resentful I was of her for the first couple years of her life, and how guilt-ridden I was over feeling resentful in the first place, seems so far away. But it’s still very real. I read somewhere that mothers forget the severity of the pain of childbirth as the body’s way of making sure that the human species could go on procreating or no woman would ever want to have more than one baby. I didn’t even have the baby though, and I remember how hard that shit was.

My point? Do you remember some years ago there was a movement online called the It Gets Better Project? It was created, according to their website, to “inspire people across the globe to share their stories and remind the next generation of LGBTQ+ youth that hope is out there, and it will get better.” I’m lucky I never needed that as a teenager. But as a new mom? You bet I did. So I’m here to say to all the parents out there, it does get better. So much better. For me, it took being able to interact with my kid, to hear her laugh, to play, to sing together, for me to fall in love with being a parent, and to stop feeling so guilty about why I didn’t experience what other moms seemed to. As bad as it was at the beginning, that’s how good it is now. And if you’re going through something similar now, it’s okay. It gets better. I promise.

- Sara

Make sure to follow Sara here: www.voicestudiola.com