Emotions: Betrayal

My emotions have run the gamut the past few days, but one that keeps coming back to me is that of feeling betrayed.

I've been so angry that my body was seemingly ready to spit out my unborn child without so much as a twinge of pain.  If we'd not had the ultrasound when we did, what would have happened?  Would the baby have just fallen out in the street?

The postpartum recovery process has added to my feelings of betrayal.  The bleeding has not been nearly as bad as I expected, and I've had little to no pain.  In the hospital, the nurses kept checking my belly to make sure my uterus was going down properly.  They seemed surprised that I was doing so well.  In less than a week, I am back into my prepregnancy pants, and weigh less than I have in probably two years.  This rapid physical recovery has just really made me feel as if my body was trying to erase every sign that it had ever housed a growing baby.

But despite that, the kicker is this: breast milk.  While I'm feeling like my body betrayed me in the worst way, my milk came in the day after getting out of the hospital.  Here I am, hating what my body is doing.  NOW my body wants to love and nourish my baby.  Did my body miss the "I'm pregnant" memo?  Or did it just forget?  It certainly got the "We had a baby" memo.

My breasts have been engorged for four days now.  It's getting better, as I haven't expressed the milk at all.  But, I'm just stung by the irony that it's taking longer for the milk to go away than it did to get my body back.