Let me preface this post by saying that I love my two boys more than anything in the world. I am blessed to be their mother, and I am blessed that I got to carry them for a collective 19 months.
Now for the realism: The Postpartum Stage has not been kind to me. In the interest of keeping it real around here, I am about to list my bizarre after-birth occurrences.
1. Hair Loss– I had some minor hair-shedding after Gregory, my first, but my second pregnancy was another story entirely. I lost CLUMPS. I look back at certain postpartum pics, and I can actually see bald spots in various places.
The shedding has slowed, thank God, but I still lose more hair on a daily basis than I used to. All of the bald spots have grown back in, producing the weirdest cowlicks and fly-aways. No fair.
2. Nickel Allergy– I can no longer wear any gold that contains nickel as an alloy. This includes my lovely wedding ring. I’ve been coating it with nail polish for the past couple months, but it gets gunky and I’m afraid of tarnishing the gold. I’ve talked to several jewelers about rhodium plating, but they all say that it will only last for a month or two. At $50/pop, that’s around $300/year of maintenance.
3. Gluten and Soy Allergy– I’m not positive that these are due to postpartum, but from the research I’ve done, it seems that auto-immune responses are like dominoes. After 27 years, I can only explain these sudden allergies by saying that they are probably piggy-backing off of the nickel allergy.
4. Foot Size– My feet have grown half a size, thanks to all the relaxin chemicals in pregnancy.
Bizarre, no?
Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with any of the more common side effects, such as weight gain or stretch marks. But I am still coming to grips with how different my life is, now that I’ve gone through pregnancy.
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Pregnancy does crazy things to your body, doesn’t it. I looked great after I had my youngest daughter but 19 months later, my son….completely different affair! My nose grew, I swear it and I had the most awful PP depression that the first four months of his life are a blur to me. Awful? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely! By the way, you look fantastic…beautiful! Thank you for the post!
Oh my, postpartum depression is the worst! I had touches of it here and there, nothing too bad, but it was still so hard. People just don’t realize!
And here I thought I was the only one with these bizarre new allergies after having children. I wonder if its the RH factor. Were you RH- by any chance? I was compatible with our oldest but I was not with our youngest and I am wondering if that has anything to do with this? Hmmm….
Kate, I don’t know! That’s a really interesting thought! Perhaps that could explain why one postpartum had side effects but the other didn’t!