When a Type A brings home a baby....

I know that I’m Type A for a few reasons:
- I’ve had both academic colours and an eating disorder.
- I cannot read a menu without finding a spelling mistake on it (do you know how many places can’t spell cappuccino? WTF?)
- I have one of those ‘Brother’ labeling machines. And it calms me.
- I entered every breastfeed into an Excel spreadsheet until Liam was six months old. Yup. True story.

For those of you fortunate enough not to be one of Us, Type A’s, at their worst, resemble Ari Gold from Entourage: brash, impatient workaholics driven by deadlines and a need to achieve. At their best, they are articulate, efficient, organised and have excellent attention to detail. Type A’s are more prone to stress-related illnesses like heart disease (two times more prone, or so they say) and stroke. They’re also vulnerable to behavioural manifestations of low self esteem. Eating disorders are a firm favourite, because the precision and control they demand counters the internal chaos the Type A typically contends with. Drug and alcohol use is also common: cocaine manages the crappy self esteem, with the added benefit of super-charged energy (Score. More energy to get more done); depressants help to quell the anxiety.

It was the night we brought Liam, our first son, home from the hospital. David and I were sitting at the end of our dining room table with two bowls of my mom’s chicken soup and a baby monitor. My baby was perfect, my C-section was healing nicely and I was a train wreck. Halfway through salting the soup with my seemingly leaking eyeballs, Liam started to cry. On cue, both my milk and a 30 year store of adrenalin flooded in. My husband was being loving and empathic and supportive and I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Up until that very moment, I had been completely on top of my life.

And then, over a bowl of chicken soup, everything changed.

The ‘everything’ that changed, in retrospect, was not as neat and tidy as I used to think: as my therapist likes to tell me, I have a lot of ‘very adaptive defenses’. By this, he means that all of my Type A compulsions are merely methods for managing and often avoiding my anxiety. And here I was, thinking of I was just ultra-organised. Go figure.

The Big Problem with motherhood is that your ‘very adaptive defences’ don’t prove very adaptive. And nobody tells you that. Not even your friends.