Sanity

Dear Byrd,
I am often advised to provide a rigid schedule to help you learn to sleep and live well. Dad and I have very little of a regular schedule. I know we do similar things at similar times each day, but timing and order of things are all over the place, even when we eat dinner can vary by three or four hours day to day.
After your birth I did not have any of my most commonly used soothing mechanisms, no sex, no exercise, no outdoors (b/c it was below zero and icy and I could not walk much). I was sleep deprived. This pushed me to a crude level of thinking about my sanity, I felt like sanity was based on sleep, art (usually writing), and exercise. Things have improved greatly in the last six months, I can imagine doing several things in one day, I can take you to the grocery store, I can concentrate on several things in a day, I can remember the end of my sentences. Sometimes though I notice remaining fragility. I fainted a few times early postpartum and this has left me with a fear of fainting every time I leave the house, when I am standing talking to other people. Even waiting at the deli counter the thought occurs to me, what if I faint, am I feeling the start of fainting? And then I bounce you and move from foot to foot to stimulate my blood flow. When we returned from a week with my family and Dad talked about going in to work for the afternoon I panicked, I did not want to be home alone just you and I. The fear of social isolation is still deeply ingrained in me. The having an infant and the physical recovery in the deep of winter was so isolating.
We go to a weekly baby-mama class and this feels important to my sanity. It is like how I need to see women in the sciences to feel comfortable there myself, or how minorities need minority role models. It makes me feel so much more comfortable with my new mama self to go sit with other moms, to see so many babies, and to hear that every baby is different, this is hard, this is fun, this is continually changing, and it is beautiful.
Love,
Mom