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Pondering Parenting Paradoxes

• I love love love to hold my daughter. But the second someone offers to hold her, I am pleased to hand her over and have my hands free.

• Breastfeeding is supposed to be 'natural'. But if it was so natural, why did I need instructions from La Leche League, other moms, books, photographs, websites, and printed hospital fact sheets? If it weren't for all the supplementary material, I would not have known how to breastfeed my baby while keeping my breasts healthy and comfortable.
  
• Bringing a new baby into the family is a joyous time but postpartum hormones and sleep deprivation conspire together to set the stage for postpartum depression.
• Babies are born with reflexes, intuition and their own brand of wisdom. Yet they don't have basic physiological skills or knowledge. For example, my baby does not know how to fall asleep. And her own bowel movements frighten her. (I guess you could say that her bowel movements scare the shit outta her.) As a mother, my job is to soothe my baby to sleep and monitor her crying cues so that I can distinguish between a "poo freak out cry" and her other cries (tired, bored, hungry, etc.)
• My baby can sleep through the white noise of a busy cafe, but the moment I ball up my empty take out bag, she wakes up from the quiet crinkly noise. How can she pick out the paper bag noise from the crash of the ice machine, cell phone rings, chatter, slamming doors, espresso machine, and more?
• When my daughter is napping and I have the opportunity to do other things, I sometimes use the time to look at photos of her. This paradox especially confuses me. If I want to look at my baby, I may as well put the photos away and go stare at her while she naps. At least then I would be looking at the real thing instead of a virtual 2D image of her.
  
• The conventional wisdom implies that parents forget the agony of childbirth and the chaos and craziness of the newborn days so that they won't be discouraged from having more children. During my postpartum recovery I talked to many different moms and I discovered that if I asked them specific questions about their own childbirth experience and their life with a newborn they all remembered very clearly and in great detail exactly what they went through. There was not a single mom who I questioned who 'forgot' or 'couldn't remember' what it felt like as they recovered from pregnancy and childbirth while taking on the challenges of breastfeeding and child care.
• We live in a time where (some) fathers are happily willing to take on 50% of the parenting responsibilities. But even if dads are eager and able, the mother-baby bond is so intense that a 50/50 division is unattainable (if you are in a family that has achieved 50/50, tell me how you achieved this!)
• I love my daughter exactly the way she is and wouldn't change a thing about her, but I covet the fantasy presented by a few other babies I have seen who sleep all the time and are easily portable, allowing their smug parents to go about their lives as if the kid wasn't even there.
• My husband doesn't care for clothes and fashion and he can't (or won't) shop for himself, but when it comes to dressing the baby he is a fantastic fashionista.
• A baby's cry is the most irritating sound on earth, but instead of running away from the sound, we run towards it.