For Being So Tiny, Babies Sure Are Heavy

My musculoskeletal system would like a word

My left shoulder is creaky. It started earlier this month. One morning, I woke up feeling like it needed some oiling, Tin Man-style. My lower back felt as though I'd slept at a strange angle. My calves were cramps-in-waiting. I felt as though I'd done some sloppy CrossFit in my sleep.

The source of the sudden achiness was a mystery. I'm not doing anything athletic right now, especially anything involving throwing. Before and during my pregnancy, I was physically active. I'd never dealt with many aches and pains before. Going from zero to this as a natural consequence of aging wouldn't make sense. Did the years catch up all at once? Was I atrophying? Had the COO of my body decided to pack it up, that's it, that's all she wrote, it's all creaks from here on out?

Then I realized the issue: it's the baby.

Before I became a parent, I didn't realize that caring for a baby meant muscle soreness. I understood all of the components of why my body might feel like a rusty steampunk contraption: I knew that babies like to be held for long periods of time. I know what it feels like to lift 10 lbs. I just had not put the two together and thought about what it would feel like like to hold a 10 lb weight for hours and hours, sometimes in a position that is painful for your neck, and when you set the 10 lb weight down, sometimes it yells at you. The weight increases gradually, week over week, for a few years. You get no breaks.

Juniper loves to be carried around so that she can observe with wonder various interesting spectacles she's never previously seen. She's only three months old; she's barely seen anything, so every single day must feel like a Flaming Lips concert during that era when Wayne used to walk on top of the crowd in an enormous inflatable bubble. The baby's journey of discovery is cool to witness, but exhausting to enable. My arms and back are shot.

It's almost impossible to feed a baby with good posture. Right now, as I type this with my left hand only, I am feeding my child who is propped up on a Dock a Tot with a bottle held in my right hand and somehow also slouching. I've spent hours slumped over her as she decides to enjoy a half hour-long meal at 3 am followed by our pediatrician-recommended 20 minutes of holding her upright to burp afterward. My spine is never straight, my core never engaged. I am a prawn curled around my baby for a significant percentage of my day. I am a yoga instuctor's nightmare.

Like most babies, Juniper is into "contact napping," which is a sanitized term meaning "wants to be held while sleeping." Like many terms around the care for small infants, the presence of a caretaker is invisible but indispensable. Contact napped-upon whom? Do they get to sleep? Seventy-five percent of the time, it is up on me. The mom.

My husband has tried to split Juniper duties with me; he changes the majority of her diapers, he plays with her, he feeds her, he puts her to sleep. She loves it when her dad takes her on walks through the neighborhood in the Baby Bjorn carrier and will occasionally, reluctantly nap on him. But when she is tired and fussy, her expectation is that it is my body that will give her food and comfort. I am Parent, dad is Vice Parent.

Earlier, after trying for several minutes to calm her down, Josh said: "Can you take her? She wants to be near boobs." He was right. I put her on my chest with the side of her face above on my collarbone, and laid back in the recliner. She fell asleep immediately and stayed like that for two hours as I grew bored watching TikToks debating the morality of the #westelmcaleb hashtag. When the nap was done my creaky left shoulder throbbed so much I had to take some ibuprofen and I missed the Rams had beaten the Bucs.

The baby is too young to understand basic commands ("Stop kicking my boobs") much less a feminist lecture about the importance of equal division of household labor and the importance of female autonomy even within the context of a hetero nuclear family. She just wants Mom. She doesn't care if Mom hasn't had a chance to brush her teeth today.

But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't kind of nice.

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