Adventures in Hormones

Having a new baby is never easy, whether it is your first or your fifteenth. Labor is hard and your hormones are rampaging. My son will be a year old soon. When he was born, he had premature lungs and severe jaundice. After three days under an oxygen hood, the hospital let us go home.

I wasn't ready to deal with two kids under three on my own yet, and my husband's job could not spare him. I packed up the kids and went to my parents' house. While I was there, I got a call from my son's pediatrician- his jaundice was worse and he needed a bilirubin blanket. It was a weekend, but she had arranged for me to pick one up at the medical supply rental agency 45 minutes away. This was going to involve complex timing on my part since I was exclusively breastfeeding my son and newborns eat so often. For some reason, it never occurred to me that he could go with me to get the blanket. I fed him, hopped in my car and away I went. I was anxious to get there to get the blanket and my foot got heavy on the pedal. Naturally, being in a hurry, I was pulled over in the one place that in fifteen years of driving I had never seen a police officer. He pulled me over and walked up to the car. He asked the inevitable question "Ma'am, do you know why I pulled you over?"

That was when I lost it. I began crying hysterically and telling him the entire story. I'm sure I looked like a mess in my pajama pants, not having really slept in days and my hair in a rat's nest. I ended the story with "And I know how dumb it is to speed because if I died I have both car seats in the car and no one would even be able to come identify me because they couldn't bring the kids!"

That poor man. He just looked at me, handed back my license and told me to slow down, and ran back to his car. We both learned that day that postpartum hormones are nothing to mess with.