Parenthood (親子関係, 어버이의 신분, 父母)

No TV show or movie has ever depicted the first 2 weeks of parenthood as it really is. Sure, they get the first moments after the birth when the screaming baby is delivered into her mother's waiting arms and the family is overjoyed by meeting the baby (or just relieved after many hours of labor for the mother), that's the exciting part. The mundane, unsexy part that they skip over in the movies and suddenly the baby is 2 years old or something, is the part AFTER those first moments, when they deliver the baby and then....life as a parent begins. I thought there would be some sort of waiting period, something akin to the movies where the babies are taken to a room with all other babies and parents go see the babies through the glass and point out which one is theirs (I'd think it's actually hard to tell because many babies look similar and you've barely seen the baby at that point to know what he/she looks like), but nope, for us the baby was given to us to hold, the doctors and pediatric team left the operating room, we were ushered out to clear up for the next patient, and suddenly we were in the recovery room just the three of us, with 2 of us having no experience whatsoever on how to take care of the third. MJ and I were ready for the first several weeks of childbirth to be hard, having heard from family, friends, Reddit posts, Youtube videos, and parenting books I bought from the library from a different century (before 2000), but the real thing hits hard, especially when you're ALREADY sleep deprived. We'd luckily been able to sleep amply the last few weeks before baby, average being 8 or 9 hours a night so we had banked quite a lot of rest equity, but the night before the delivery we slept just 4 hours (I know, new parents are rolling their eyes now going, that's A LOT) but what with the adrenaline of seeing our new baby, moving into a new environment, and everything being new, I was exhausted already and we were on DAY ZERO of parenting. (Somehow MJ and I did manage to watch Jeopardy that night though). Parenthood, unlike the joyous crying and fulfillment seen in films, is a grind, always being on call for the baby's needs, not sure when it's going to happen or where it's going to happen (could be poop, could be crying for food) but it's dedicating your life 24/7 to something that henceforth you hadn't dedicated to. It's not the "toughest" thing or anything, our baby weighted just over 6 pounds and wasn't hard to carry around, but it's just the constant grind of always having to be there, she's the center of attention, the priority that you have to drop everything for, that's definitely new, which makes sense why parents kept telling me "say goodbye to your previous life." O man my previous life was just a wonderland of free time before this, other than my job, food, and some daily necessities I could do anything; now my schedule is booked up from 8AM to.......well, 8AM. Babies don't have sleep patterns, they don't care about your sleep patterns, and they don't care about day and night. It's a lot of "rinse and repeat."- wake her up, change her diaper, feed her until she's full, burp the baby, hold the baby until she falls asleep.....until she wakes up, and then the cycle starts again. There are no breaks; you cannot call a timeout on parenthood, there are no sabbaticals, winter hiatuses, even bathroom breaks are risky because baby might just choose that time to launch an emergency. It's the full-time version of a full-time job. It's FULL time, like 100% of your time. Well, with some exceptions. Luckily MJ planned ahead and hired a post-partum doula, and after getting back to the hospital our doula cooked meals and watched baby overnight while I could sleep (MJ still has to do breast pumping). A HUGE relief because I was reaching the end of my patience and stamina and adrenaline; those were only carrying me so far until I just collapsed. Now I'm back to my normal schedule of sleep! Yay for me! But also the doula won't be here forever and happy days won't last forever; the witching hour weeks (baby getting fuzzy for no reason) are approaching and the doula is leaving, something I'm really dreading but will be here in a flash. It's like the beginning of the movie, MJ and I have survived the opening rush onto the beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan, but now the real battle begins that we're probably not ready for. If TV and movies were misleading in depciting parenthood for the first 2 weeks (that it zooms by and suddenly your baby is all grown up! Spoiler alert: they don't, the days are long and the years are short, as they say) then they probably REALLY glossed over weeks 2 through 8, trying to establish a sleep schedule and stick with it. THEY REALLY didn't want to show that, really unsexy and just a mundane grind. Fun stuff!