My New Mother, Google

I have no idea how I could have been a mother without being a librarian. We'd still be trying to get you out of the car seat! There was just so much I didn't know and no one I felt comfortable asking. Besides, I have, and I hope you've not inherited it, a deep-seated dislike to being told what to do. I don't like to let anyone tell me what to do. If I'm making a new soup, I'll find three different recipes and combine them. If I've got something to make, I'll shop around for different ideas and come up with my own take. When I was in college, I didn't research and form a viewpoint on a topic. I formed a viewpoint and then found quotes that agreed with me. Terrible, I know, but it's how I do things. And so, I'm most comfortable with tracking down a whole bunch of viewpoints, sifting through them for bits of common sense, threads of common philosophy, and snippets of research, to come up with an approach.

I really should have kept track of my Google history, because my searches over the last five months - actually over the last seventeen months - detail virtually ever question, dilemma, or irrational fear I've had. We could start in the summer of 2009 with searches about planning for pregnancy, appropriate vitamin supplements and folic acid levels. Then we move into basal body temperature tracking, luteal phase information, and sample charts. (This phase was repeated over and over. No matter how confident I was in my math, the months of September, October, November, and December found me lying in bed late at night constantly counting and subtracting days in my head before getting up to double-check the number of days in the various phases of menstruation with a Google search. I had a calendar and a thermometer within arm's reach for weeks!) Then came days of searching for how early pregnancy can be detected, what first trimester symptoms there might be, and how I might recognize them.

Of course, after I confirmed I was pregnant, I searched for cute ways to tell your grandparents, what to expect at neonatal appointments, and a practice with midwives and a history of noninterference. For most of pregnancy, my searches fall into two categories - planning and panicking. I planned and planned. I searched for lists of questions to ask potential midwives, I researched birth costs and induction rates, I read up on the recommended supplements. And then, mostly late at night, I panicked. Sometimes it was because I had symptoms of something, but sometimes it was because of the near lack of symptoms. What are late-term miscarriage rates? Is my baby moving enough? Can my baby be moving too much? Am I gaining enough weight? What can I do if I'm gaining too much? Hours and hours of searching, reading accounts of strange concerns and even stranger side effects.

And then my due date came....



I wasn't concerned with labor pain, afraid of the process of having you, but just anxious for you to get here. How long was it going to take? How likely was I to go past my due date? I read labor stories from all sorts of online forums, examining the decisions others made, taking in concerns about where they felt the process had left their control. And then as I did go breezing past my due date, dilated to 7 cm, I started wondering if you'd come too quickly. Two days before you were born, I even did a few searches on emergency deliveries, just to make sure that we'd know what to do if we needed to deliver you here at home. I bookmarked a link and briefed your dad on the basics.

No need to worry though, as you arrived with no fuss at all, and when we got home, I found we'd brought a whole new realm of questions with us. Breastfeeding especially made for lots of questions: Were you getting enough milk? Was I making enough milk? How much pain was normal? Could your frenulum need clipped? Did you have thrush or did I have yeast? How often should you be eating and for how long? And the questions didn't stop for months. How bad was your jaundice? Were you getting enough time with your light blanket? How do I fold cloth diapers? Did you have colic or just gas? How long would it take for your head to even out and for the bones to knit together? Why were your pupils different sizes? How much should you be sleeping? Why was nursing still so painful? Should I try to put you on a schedule or let you figure one out? Would you get rickets if I didn't give you your smelly vitamin supplements? Could you get vitamin D from sunshine that came through the window? And on and on and on....

The questions come less often now and I do less generalized worrying, but they're still there. Without a tribe of women in my life, without a mother, a sister, friends who live nearby, I turned to the "virtual tribe" for wisdom and insight. Of course, I think even your grandmother would have been worn out by all the questions I had, but I want you to know all this for a few reasons. First of all, if you have to someday, you can completely do this by yourself. You'll be worried and I won't tell you not to be, because that's pointless, but you will be able to manage. And while you'll discover that I'm not perfect, I think you'll probably always feel that I had all the answers when you were young, and I want you to know I really didn't. I just knew where to look and to keep asking and looking until I got satisfactory answers. Turns out Reference Desk 101 is also Motherhood 101: you don't have to know all the answers, you just have to know where to find them.