So Sallie Says

I will be the first person to tell you that my children are the greatest joys of my life. My baby is so cute I have to bite my own hand sometimes and having a toddler is hilarious. 

But listen, there are some ugly, unavoidable things that happen when you have kids, and I would be a terrible friend if I wasn’t honest about them.

Night sweats

A boys’ high school cross country team doesn’t sweat as much in a season as I did in one night of postpartum recovery, and if you’re thinking to yourself “Wow, did she have to use such a disgusting visual metaphor?”I would say: if hearing about it is gross, imagine living it, baby.

Hair loss

No one hates a three-month postpartum woman more than a shower drain. Hair loss is normal during postpartum, and it typically starts exactly when your baby starts figuring out how to grab and yank stuff with their clammy little hands. The good news according to the gospel of my hairdresser is that during pregnancy your body is busy doing superhuman things and you don’t shed as you typically do; so the hair loss is just what you would have lost during that period of time. You won’t actually end up as bald as your baby, at least for awhile.

Sleep

Having a baby ruins your sleep, and while it is as bad as they say it’s also worse than they say! Here’s the deal: not only do you not sleep when the baby comes, but you also don’t sleep way before and way after. The first sign of pregnancy is actually that nighttime sleep is immediately interrupted, becoming increasingly worse over the next 10 months to accommodate an aggressive pee schedule.

Newborns actually do sleep, a lot. I always say I get better sleep with a newborn than pregnant; sure, it’s in two-hour increments but it’s deep and heartburn-free. But then they turn into more sentient babies that for years on end hit sleep regressions, sprout teeth, develop fears of the dark, and so forth until one day you’re 42 and you’re wondering why the phrase RIP is so synonymous with death when you also haven’t had a peaceful rest in years. Or so I imagine.

Terrifying dreams

For something that affects 3 out of 4 women (according to my research in the group chat), we don’t talk about this enough. I would wake up (sweating, obviously), and start frantically looking around in the bed for the baby that my brain convinced me had suffocated in the sheets, only to realize he was sleeping safely in the bassinet two feet away, where I placed him literally every time he slept. I assume these nightmares are some sort of demented survival mechanism. Eventually my heart rate would return to normal and over time the dreams subsided but you know what they say: parenthood is just freaking out about whether your child is alive for the rest of your life.

The plague(s)

Children are just agents of chaos. They exist to bring viruses, bacteria, and tiny rocks from the playground into your home (fortunately, a few of those things can be eradicated in your dryer). Now, my own attitude toward health has changed to utter apathy. Of course I want to limit the spread of germs. I don’t enjoy having my eyeballs coughed into and I certainly don’t like that my pockets are filled with used tissues, but there comes a time when it’s pointless to fight it and honestly, it’s better just to get sick and get it over with. 

I know this all sounds bad, and it is. I don’t make the rules, I just complain about them. And, if there’s one thing I know about parenting it’s that you take the good with the bad. For every 14 awful things about parenthood there is one fleeting moment that makes it all worth it, so my advice is just hang on to those for dear life.