Five months after having a baby things are getting back to normal. Well, the new normal anyway, in our new life with a baby! Emotionally, however, I still have a little ways to go -- not that I was the tin man (tin woman?) before but I'm on a whole different level now. I'm still breastfeeding and still have a whole lotta momma hormones that make me very attached, ready to defend my baby from lions and able to cry at the drop of a hat.
While perusing movies on Netflix one evening I came across The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I don't know why I thought watching a movie set in WWII Germany was a good idea one month postpartum. Either I wasn't thinking (likely sleep-deprived possibility) or I was thinking it might be sad yet heart-warming, like It's a Wonderful Life. Nope. At the end I was crying. Not just teary-eyed, but crying. Lesson learned: no more war movies for now.
Another exhausted evening, another Netflix show (you'll notice a pattern emerging) but this time I looked through the documentaries. Surely a nature documentary would be fine; I am a biologist after all. Nope, not good either. Babies die in nature documentaries!! Not human babies, mind you, but that detail doesn't seem to matter. They showed a polar bear going off with a walrus baby and I felt soooo bad for the walrus momma! If it had been a baby goat that got eaten I don't know what I would have done. OK, nature docs are out.
Next up, a British TV series called Call the Midwife. I was doing okay until they told the story of a teenage mother whose baby was forcefully taken for adoption. The poor (fictional) girl cried and yelled for her baby, I cried, and my milk let down! Some other scenarios were a little too recent but I made it through (yes, the whole series. Randy spent a week working late and I was alone in the evenings with only Halloween candy to keep me company.).
Last Saturday our evening was a blank slate so of course we turned to Netflix (this could be a post in itself). I had heard a lot of talk of 12 Years a Slave but hadn't seen it so we settled in to watch. I know slavery isn't a happy topic but it didn't immediately conjure up images of babies dying so I thought it would be safe. Wrong again. I could see from the opening that the happy father was going to be sold into slavery and wouldn't see his young kids again, presumably for 12 years. So I decided to save myself the heartache and turned it off.
My sense of humour still seems to be intact so we're sticking to comedies for now!
