The fourth trimester

When I discovered I was pregnant with my second baby, I looked forward to the birth day with much anticipation.  I couldn’t wait to relive the first meeting of our baby.  I recognized another feeling as well, one filled with dread.  I would have to relive those early weeks with a newborn baby.  Hazy, blurred days.  Body sore and weak.  Inescapable anxiety and nervousness.  A feeling of teetering on the edge of days that blend together without end.  Adjusting to life with a newborn baby was more difficult that I ever imagined.  I need not have worried; the second time around, I blissfully basked in the fleeting early days of my newborn.  The somewhat harrowing weeks adjusting to a new baby thankfully prepare you for next babies…not that you realize that at the time.

Upon leaving the birth centre, a sense of panic settled in.  We were leaving with a real, live little being strapped in a car seat and we now had to drive.  Hesitantly we started the car and nervously we left the parking lot.  We were now on our own and we were responsible for this life on our back seat.  Sighing with relief, we pulled up in front of our home; we made it!  Gingerly we took him out of the seat and laid him in the teak bassinet.  He looked so beautiful, I couldn’t stop looking at him.  We then began preparing for a flurry of visitors.  My parents arrived and proudly held our baby.  I felt relaxed and still on a high after the seamless birth.  My husband enthusiastically showed an unedited slide show of the entire birth.  It was graphic, too graphic to show but incredible footage to relive not even 24 hours later.  I requested he refrain from sharing the slide show with future visitors.  It was a gorgeous fall day and our backyard began collecting friends who seemed oblivious to the exhausting, incredible feat my body had endured mere hours before.  Maybe we should show the slide show after all.  The excitement of the presence of well-meaning guests began to morph into a desire to shield my baby from passing arms and to retreat into a mama and baby cocoon. By the time grandma had arrived to meet her first grandchild, I felt myself beginning to bubble over.  I simmered for days and wanted everyone to leave me and my baby alone.  On Day 3 postpartum came the baby blues.  I cried uncontrollably and inconsolably for hours while my husband held our baby.  Ahhh, release.  It all felt much better after that.

Cocoon we did.  I didn’t leave the house for the first week.  I welcomed the nurses who visit within 48 hours of birth to check in and perform newborn screening tests.  I asked endless questions to help assure me that I was doing everything right.  We talked about poo, pee, sleep, boobs, vaginal tenderness and bleeding, hormone induced anxiety, crying, colostrum, breast milk, diaper rash, umbilical cord stump care…  Thank god for those nurses!  They checked his latch and weighed him.  Breastfeeding was working beautifully; he was gaining weight and latching well.  And breastfeed we did, for hours and hours everyday.  I spent very little time sitting in our living room prior to Jasper’s arrival.  This was soon to be the most used room in our house.  He fed every hour, maybe every two if I was lucky and the first public appearance I made was at to buy a nursing pillow.  I settled into the dreamlike nursing state, devouring baby books and novels that were collecting dust.  The satisfied, safe, peaceful face of a newborn resting on your chest after a feed is the most treasured image of the first weeks.

Sleep and bedtime were the best part of the day.  I had planned to have him sleep in the bassinet right next to my bed but on the first night, I tossed and turned, clicking the lamp on and off every 10 minutes checking for breathing.  When he cried to be fed, I welcomed him into the bed and he never left.  It felt so right to have him nestled beside me.  After sleeping with him inside me for 9 months, I couldn’t relax with him away from me and he seemed to concur.  He slept, restless when he needed to eat and then settled quickly and easily.  We mastered the side lying nursing position, still one of my favorites, and had the best sleeps together.  The first question my midwife asked at our follow-up appointment was “How is your sleep?”.  I admitted I loved it.  I looked forward to bedtime with relish and felt well rested.  He was nursing through the night, but I did not feel the sleep deprivation I was dreading.  Nighttime was instead an intense bonding time for us both.  Sleeping with my baby made the adjustment from oneness to two smoother and easier.

The first time we left the house together was for a walk around the block to try out the carrier.  My husband wore him as I was still too sore to carry him for too long.  I was shocked at how weak I still was, a week after birth and found even a short walk difficult.  Strangers stopped us to ask how old our baby was.  The freshly born attract much attention.  It is such a precious time of life and people are naturally attracted to their energy.  I understood, it is an indescribable aura of newness, innocence.  We beamed as we showed our baby to the world.  It is the fragility, the tiny body, the complete dependence that fascinates.  We were all at this fragile state once, nurtured into the world by someone and we made it this far.  It seems impossible and indeed at times it felt like it was.  The predictable, endless cycle of sleep and eat was wrought with shaky instability and uneasiness.  Knowing that this life was 100% relying on you for survival, short of breathing but whose every breath is celebrated and scrutinized, is overwhelming and unnerving the first time around.  It is hard to mentally prepare for the complete switch from worrying solely about self to solely another.  They consume every second:  “Is their head supported?  I forgot to change the diaper!  Deep breath, I am going to walk down stairs with baby in arms.  Yes, you can hold him! (hold his head!, he is slipping, don’t drop him!).  Is it normal for him to eat for 5 hours straight?  He won’t stop!  Okay, bath time! (yikes!)”  The first weeks are a time of adjustment.

They call it the fourth trimester.  I once read a theory that ideally the baby would stay in utero for an additional 3 months but would then be too large to exit the birth canal.  Human infants are thus fragile and dependent.

James McKenna, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Notre Dame University, has researched the connection between babies’ brain maturity at birth and our species’ anthropological construction. In a 1994 article in the journal Children’s Environments, McKenna explains that when primitive women evolved to stand up on two legs, the shape of the female pelvis became narrower and resulted in human babies being born three to four months earlier, before their heads grew too large to pass safely through the birth canal.

For this reason, some experts say human babies need the first three months of life to give their brain and central nervous system the time needed to mature. In the course of those three months, an infant develops into a baby who is able to respond to the outside world. Breathing starts to regulate. She becomes able to lift her head, smile, coo, develop social interactions, and begin to soothe herself. This time between birth and the end of a baby’s third month is a unique stage of life that many now refer to as the “fourth trimester.”  

Indeed, after several weeks of adjusting, I began to embrace my role in facilitating the needs of the fourth trimester.  At 3 months old, a switch turned on.  Smiling, babbling, engaging, my baby woke up from the newborn haze and so did I.  I found myself looking at him and sighing, “Oh, I remember when you were just a baby” and reminiscing about our first days together.  In the midst of the first weeks, the days seem endless.  In retrospect, they seem far too short.