You had a beautiful delivery. Everything you put in your birth plan came true. Having a baby was easier than you thought it would be. Your child latched immediately and you just felt so connected to this new person. You locked eyes with your partner and just knew everything was going to be great.
Was this you? (If so, why are you here?)
Just kidding. Mostly…
This wasn’t me.
There was no immediate latching. No immediate newborn bonding. No shared sense of “this is great” between my husband and I. But I still remember a moment of intense bonding, a little later.
It was somewhere in those first two weeks. Our first two-week stretch of never sleeping more than a couple hours at a time. Nerves were frazzled. Eyes were bloodshot. Brains were barely functional. I had just gotten to sleep for 15 minutes when our daughter started crying again.
It just came out. “Wankerberry is crying again!” (Side note: apologies to anyone in the UK for whom this is a very bad word).
I don’t know where it came from. Clearly, I had been watching too much British and Australian TV…and I guess on some level I knew I had to soften it, and add the “berry”?
But THAT bit of absolute nonsense was our deep bonding moment. With our crying newborn and with each other. That moment, my husband and I locked eyes and knew it would be all butterflies and wonderful things from then on.
Ok, that’s not true. But it really was a moment that made it all seem a little more doable. And we were both cracking up a second later, which actually was kind of magical.
So our daughter became, in those moments when I didn’t know if I could physically continue living on so little sleep, our little wankerberry. The ridiculousness of the nickname matched the ridiculousness of our lives. And brought us a little closer.
Do you have a wankerberry in your life?
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