Lisa Abramson says that even after all she’s been through – the helicopters circling her house, the snipers on the roof, and the car ride to jail – she still wants to have a second child.
Because, in the beginning, when her daughter was born, Lisa was smitten, just like the mom she’d imagined she would be. She’d look into her baby’s round, alert eyes and feel the adrenaline rush through her. She had so much energy. She was so excited.
“I actually was thinking like, ‘I don’t get why other moms say they’re so tired or this is so hard. I got this,’” she says.
Lisa wanted to be the perfect mom. She was ready to be the perfect mom. She’d been a successful marketing executive for a Silicon Valley tech company and a successful entrepreneur. And that first week after her baby was born, everything was going according to plan. The world was nothing but love.
But even when Lisa did get tired, and she got time to sleep, she couldn’t.
Then, the baby started losing weight, and the pediatrician told Lisa to feed her every two hours.
“That meant breastfeed and then pump, and then feed her the pumped milk and then clean the pumping parts, which is always something no one thinks about but takes about 20 minutes,” she says. “Basically, through that every two-hour feeding cycle, I had 10 minutes of downtime.”
Lisa started to feel like she couldn’t keep up. She felt overwhelmed and guilty. Really guilty.
“It weighed on me as 'I failed as a mom. I can’t feed my child,' she says. “I needed to feed her, that was the most important thing, and my well-being didn’t matter.”
She was barely sleeping. Even when she could get a release from breastfeeding purgatory, she couldn’t relax. As she got more and more exhausted, she started to get…confused.
“I was having a conversation with someone, their voices were just distorted and it was really hard for me to understand what they were saying."
Click HERE to read the full article written by April Dembosky
Comments (0)