The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Success After Baby - Softcover

Smith Brody, Lauren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101971886 ISBN 13: 9781101971888

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Packed with honest, funny, and comforting advice—“a book you MUST read if you are returning to work after the birth of a child…. I loved it and you will too.” —New York Times bestselling author Lois P. Frankel, Ph.D.

The first three trimesters (and the fourth—those blurry newborn days) are for the baby, but the Fifth Trimester is when the working mom is born. A funny, tells-it-like-it-is guide for new mothers coping with the demands of returning to the real world after giving birth, The Fifth Trimester contains advice from 800 moms, including:

•The boss-approved way to ask for flextime (and more money!)
•How to know if it’s more than “just the baby blues”
•How to pump breastmilk on an airplane (or, if you must, in a bathroom)
•What military science knows about working through sleep deprivation
•Your new sixty-second get-out-of-the-house beauty routine
•How to turn your commute into a mini–therapy session
•Your daycare tour or nanny interview, totally decoded

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAUREN SMITH BRODY is the founder of The Fifth Trimester movement, which helps businesses and new parents work together to create a more family-friendly workplace culture. A longtime leader in the women’s magazine industry, Lauren was most recently the executive editor of Glamour magazine. Raised in Ohio, Texas, and Georgia, she now lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons.

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Introduction
 
As soon as I heard my husband’s shower running, I changed my mind.
 
I’d been up since 4:30 a.m., hanging out on the couch, having a much calmer early labor than I’d imagined. My water hadn’t broken, and the pain wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I’d felt just not-right enough to get out of bed, proud of myself for resisting the urge to nudge my sleeping spouse awake. Ben, who was finishing up his first year of medical residency at a big hospital nearby, worked hard. We both did. And I wasn’t about to pull the rookie move of waking him up just to watch me have one manageable contraction every twenty minutes. If these things even were contractions. Surely I’d have at least one round of false labor, I thought.
 
By the time Ben’s alarm went off at 6:15, I was pacing the floor, as much as one could pace in our little apartment.
 
“Definitely shower and go to work,” I told him breezily, as he gave me a hug and wrinkled his forehead, looking one part skeptical, two parts impressed. “I’m fine. It’s going to be so many hours.” I figured—if this was even real—I’d call him when things got interesting. I’d grab a cab, and he’d leave his department and meet me a couple of floors down at Labor and Delivery. Simple. Low-maintenance mother-to-be. That’s me. Plus, it was a Monday. I’d finished up my last day of work on Friday, spent the weekend getting organized like a maniac (nesting . . . right . . . that must have been nesting), and wanted at least half a day to sit around and do nothing for the first time since college. Maybe I’d go to a movie or watch all the junk TV I’d never had time for. I didn’t even know which channels were the junky ones.
 
My cervix had other plans. Over the course of Ben’s four-minute shower, I had two contractions. And as I leaned over the desk chair in the living room swaying my hips—in a way I’d never been comfortable doing on a dance floor—I changed my mind. We were having a baby. Today. Now.
 
On our way out the door, Ben grabbed the bag I’d so lovingly packed a full two months earlier: a blanket, a first little “going-home” outfit, our good camera, nursing bras, maternity yoga pants. We looked at each other, wide awake and thrilled. Here we go.
 
“Oh my God, wait!” I said as we buzzed for the elevator. “I forgot my folder!”
 
“Your folder?” he asked. “Why do you need a folder?”
 
I ran back in toward the bedroom, stopping to have another contraction leaning over that same chair—sway, sway, sway, done— and grabbed a yellow folder that held everything I would not want to be doing during my time in the hospital: insurance paperwork; maternity leave disability information from my employer, a big media company; and, yes, some actual work that I took with me from the office before tearfully hugging my boss at Glamour magazine goodbye on Friday. I’d do it in labor, I thought. Ha! There was a famous story inside my industry about a particularly She-Ra–like editor-in-chief who’d faxed back edited copy to the office minutes before pushing out her fifth child. My own boss’s boss had taken a quick two-week leave with her first child, and was photographed and interviewed by The New York Times (dressed in Miu Miu, in her beautiful Soho loft) just days after having her second baby. This was what women did, I thought. They balanced!
 
You know how the rest of this story goes. I did not do any actual work at the hospital.
 
What I did do was: have a pain freak-out, then an immediate epidural (I’d arrived at four centimeters dilated—still proud of that). From the hospital bed, I did a little bit of texting, a lot of moaning, and made a couple of elated high-on-the-epidural phone calls to friends and family—not the office—and then, finally, I gave birth. Easily, thankfully, with my awesome husband cheering for me harder than he’s ever even cheered for his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers. Our son was born. And with eyes nearly swollen shut and a face full of baby acne, he was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. That work folder? It sat.
 
I brought the folder home from the hospital, and it sat some more. On a table right next to the bassinet, actually (like I said, small apartment). Eventually, it was covered up by piles of baby detritus: gifts, half-written thank-you notes, an unused Boppy. Still, it haunted me a bit every day. I knew it was there, a little time bomb, just ticking off the minutes until my twelve-week maternity leave would be over. Worried about money, I filled out the disability paperwork, then shoved everything else right back under that pile.
 
Our baby, Will, was six pounds of wonderful, but over those three months, I had what is kindly referred to as “a hard time.” He wouldn’t nurse well or soothe easily. He seemed so tiny; that “going-home” outfit I’d packed for him was miles too big. My body was torn up from top to bottom for weeks. I worried and had crazy, frightening thoughts. Young for parenthood—by NYC standards, anyway—I had no close friends who’d been through this yet. It took all I had just to stroll the carriage one block to the drugstore for diapers. A perfectly capable person, I’d made it through college, moved to New York City, broken into publishing, and was on leave from an executive-level position at one of the biggest magazines in the world. In my real life, my work life, I led an award-winning team of editors. I negotiated with celebrities (or, rather, with their “people,” which is harder). I won awards and got promoted and edited stories urging the women of America to live full lives and demand what they deserved at work, and to do it all in fabulous shoes, damn it.
 
And now, suddenly, simply crossing the street with my newborn baby gave me heart palpitations.
 
After a few days, Ben went back to work, and his life resumed some semblance of normalcy, except for the crazy wife who now greeted him desperately at the door when he arrived home. Used to be, I was the one who worked late.
 
I told everyone that Will was an easy baby, assuming the problem in this equation was me. When he was fussy I relied, appreciatively, on the bible of baby soothing, Dr. Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block. Dr. Karp advised swaddling, shushing, swinging, and a whole bunch of other S verbs meant to replicate the feeling of being in the womb. The first three months of a fullterm baby’s life, he explained, were actually premature. Because of the size of our brains and heads, human babies are born three months early and essentially have a “fourth trimester” outside of the womb. By around week twelve, the good doctor reassured me, my baby would start to wake up to the world. He’d laugh, hold his own head up, and look me in the eye and connect. He would be slightly less fragile and fussy, and maybe even start to sleep six hours in a row and nap at the same times every day. I just had to soldier on to week twelve.
 
Week twelve? The irony slapped me hard. That was exactly when I’d be going back to work.
 
***
 
And thus, the idea for this book was born right alongside my son. Sure enough, Dr. Karp was right. By about week eleven, the hormone clouds started to part over my head. I had loved my child from the beginning, but now he was giving something back. I experienced pure baby joy for the first time. And also,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101971886
• ISBN 13: 9781101971888
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 417
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland