I’ve only been at this motherhood gig for a couple of years now but it takes less than 24 hours after giving birth to learn that you might never sleep again. You do all this work of freeing a tiny human from your body and really, you’re pretty much deserving of a nap after that. I mean, I don’t know, I had a C-section and the whole labor thing was exhausting so I can only imagine that after doing things like “pushing” you’re all tuckered out.
(Admittedly I could be wrong about this because I gave birth and then someone gave me a shot of something that knocked me out for the next twelve hours. Not cool, medical people.)
When your baby is in the neonatal intensive care unit (or NICU for the veterans) you basically sleep never. Like, seriously, never. Do you know what phrase is the most annoying thing you can say to a woman who has a child in the NICU? I will tell you. It is “You’re so lucky that you get to sleep through the night while the nurses take care of your baby!”
If you say that to a sleep-deprived mother whose child is hooked to various machines IN THE NICU, she gets a free pass to slap you upside your head. Because you’re ridiculous. And because trust me, just like every other new mother out there she’s not sleeping.
When your baby is in the NICU, you still have to wake up all night long to feed it. Except most of the time you find your exhausted self attached at the breast to a mechanical pump in the middle of the night instead of a baby. Also? It’s incredibly painful in addition to just being a pain. NICU MOMS GET ALL THE PERKS, Y’ALL.*
(*That is sarcasm.)
Then there’s the whole thing about how you are pretty worried over the fact that your baby is, you know, in the hospital and so you wake up every hour or so to call said hospital and inquire about said baby. The nurses will gently say “She’s doing okay, it’s 3am so really, please try and get some sleep” and you’re all “Sleep sounds amazing. I’ll do that.” as you look at the clock and realize that it’s time to pump again.
This is when you become what is known as a “Bad Decision Maker.” Because you watch a lot of infomercials at three o clock in the morning while you’re feeding a baby and/or strapped to a breast pump and in that state of sleep deprivation everything looks amazing. Of COURSE you need a machine to make your own beef jerky. Never mind that you don’t even like beef jerky and that pre-baby the thought of dehydrating your own slabs of meat would have made you gag. YOU NEED A BEEF JERKY MACHINE RIGHT NOW.
This is why I’ve decided that parenthood should come with warning labels. Everything else does. I mean, seriously my hair straightener? It’s warning label cautions Canadians not to use it to on their eyes. I don’t know what people in Canada are doing with their flat irons but apparently it’s a serious issue north of the border.
What I’d like to see is something a little bit more useful. A Mommy Warning Label if you will. Something brightly colored in the way of those neon-yellow vests that you see on bicyclists just so that you can’t miss them. They could add them to the back of What To Expect When You’re Expecting, perforated so that you could tear them out and attach them to things that you might otherwise use in a dangerous manner under severe sleep deprivation. Things like your cell phone and the remote control, lest you end up coming home to a box on your front porch that contains a machine used to make your own beef jerky.
(You’re welcome for that little goldmine of an idea, authors of that book.)
In my mind, they would look something like this: 
This would have been totally useful to me as a new mom when someone who shall remain nameless thought that the bathroom sink was a good spot to place a tube of diaper cream. At any other time I would have been like “Oh look, a tube of diaper cream. However did that get here? That does not belong on the bathroom sink, teehee teehee.”
Instead, at a time of massive sleep deprivation, I picked up said tube of diaper cream and I brushed my teeth with it.
That’s right. I brushed my teeth with ointment that you rub on a child’s buttocks.
The worst part is, I didn’t even realize it right away. I was halfway through before the the groggy signals in my brain started going “Hey, my mouth doesn’t taste minty fresh right now. In fact, I sort of want to gag.”
Wait, that’s not actually the worst part. The worst part is that I was all “At least I brushed my teeth today” because oh, there will be days when you wonder about such things. Remember when basic personal hygiene was just part of your daily routine? You have a baby and then you’re all “Did I brush my teeth today? What is today? Is it Wednesday? Is this real life?”
(Sure you could get up and check the calendar but it’s probably on the wrong month because well, if you’re brushing your teeth with diaper cream then I doubt you’ve gotten around to changing the calendar, that’s all I’m saying.)
Also could have used a label on the entertainment center, where I routinely stumbled in the dead of the night, opened the glass door and stashed my just-pumped bottles of breast milk inside. I THOUGHT IT WAS THE FREEZER, Y’ALL. I eventually did put a note on it that said “Stop! This is not the freezer!” for my bleary-eyed self after my third mid-morning meltdown when I discovered that all that middle of the night pumping was for naught as I’d stashed it all next to the television rather than the frozen dinners. Learn from me, grasshoppers.
I realize that my situation was a little bit different than most moms on account of how my baby spent the first six months of her life in the NICU but after watching one of my friends fall asleep on a warm pile of laundry in the middle of her living room at 8pm on a Saturday night during our first Girl’s Night In after she had her third baby, I’m pretty convinced that sleep deprivation is a universal mommy issue.
(We turned off the oven for her and tucked her in with some freshly laundered baby blankets because the number one rule of parenting after “Never Wake A Sleeping Baby” is “Never Wake A Sleeping Mommy Of An Infant If She Happens To Actually Fall Asleep Even If It Is In The Middle Of A Pile Of Laundry.”)
(Also: Never Get Involved In A Land War In Asia.)
Now, I’m completely aware that warning labels don’t solve all of our problems. There was, for example, that one time that I cut off the tip of my daughter’s thumb while attempting to clip her nails. That, however, was due to the misnomer of a little thing called “Infant Safety Clippers” which should actually be called “Devices To Make Neurotic New Moms Even More Neurotic.” (Safety clippers my arse.)
I’d like to tell you that it all gets better but I’m writing this at 1am because my two and a half year old woke up asking for “anudder bowl ub gwapes” in the middle of the night and now I’m wide awake. Eating grapes. (She made me hungry.) It’s okay though because another thing you should know is that NICU or no NICU, no matter how tired you are, it’s totally worth it. 
My story is Chapter 7 in the MAM Blogger Real Parenting Guide. I encourage you to read other chapters and find out more about all the stuff, like the bottles, pacifiers and teethers that MAM makes to make the job of parenting easier.
Want to win a $100 Babies “R” Us gift card?
Leave a comment below answering the following question: “What’s the funniest thing you said (or have heard someone else say!) while in labor?”
(You can see mine here, I was hallucinating dinosaurs y’all.)
Sweepstakes Rules:
No duplicate comments.
You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:
Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the following unique term in your tweet message: “#SweepstakesEntry”; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.
This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winner will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.
The Official Rules are available here.
This sweepstakes runs from 08/21/13-10/07/13.
Be sure to visit the MAM Brand Page on BlogHer.com where you can read other bloggers’ posts and find more chances to win!
