Woori is five days old today. As I write this, she’s sleeping on her tummy on her play mat, while David builds a mini lego set with Tov.

If you visited us right now, our day would seem pretty peaceful and calm. There’s the soft ocean breeze blowing through the open windows. The gentle snores of a blissfully slumbering newborn. A contented toddler and a present father. A woman smelling sweet from breastmilk, sitting at her desk with a coffee mug and chocolate-covered pretzels, click-clacking on her keyboard. Ah, isn’t the newborn days just wonderful?

NOT.

Two hours ago, I was fighting back tears because I was so overwhelmed. Three hours ago, I was slightly freaking out that I was going blind, because it had been four hours since a white film had covered my vision, powdering everything I saw, giving me a headache.

Five hours ago, I was at a lactation support group, watching other mothers nursing and weighing their babies after to measure how much they’ve consumed. “Up 40 grams!” Jennifer, the lactation consultant pronounced, and the women cheered. Another woman’s five-week-old baby had consumed 5 whole ounces– that’s 150 grams, that overachiever.

Meanwhile, it took 30 minutes for me to finally get Woori to stop wrestling and grunting and finally suck on the breast for 20 minutes. “Oh, I can hear her swallowing a lot,” Jennifer remarked encouragingly. We weighed her after, I holding onto my breath with anticipation.

“Oh. 8 grams,” Jennifer said in a dismal voice. “Ah, she tricked me! I thought it would be more than that.”

What the freaking hell, Woori!

Six hours ago, David was yelling at Tov because he was having a roll-on-the-floor-with-snot-smearing-his-shirt kind of meltdown, simply because he did not want to wear pants. Six hours ago, I was holding Woori and watching David fly off his handle, feeling a little gratified, remembering all the times when I had lost patience with Tov, and David’s response was that I didn’t try hard enough to control my temper.

And then 12 hours ago, I was up in the wee morning, light-headed from sleeplessness, having finally finished bottle-feeding Woori 2 ounces of pumped breastmilk and formula after trying for 30 minutes to get her to breastfeed. That took more than an hour, and now I had to dry the pump parts, still wet from the last pumping session, so I can pump again before crawling back to bed.

It’s been anything but peaceful and calm.

We are on a crazy feeding plan for Woori because she refuses to breastfeed. She’s maybe successfully breastfed only three times since she was born, and even then, as the weighing scale today informed me, she barely even put 10 ml of milk inside her. So every three hours, round the clock from morning through night, I have to try to get her to practice breastfeeding, then bottle-feed her, then pump. That takes at least an hour and a half, which means about an hour later, I have to repeat the process all over again. There is no time to rest. The moment I fall asleep, my iphone blares an alarm, reminding me it’s time to feed again, and I wake up bleary-eyed and brain-fogged, a zombie with swollen, aching boobs.

Speaking of boobs. I had never once experienced the kind of engorgement I have this time round. Tov was born premature so he had a hard time latching properly, and he fed very slowly, but with the help of a nipple shield, at least he would still breastfeed.

Not Woori. This girl knows how to latch. There’s no problem with her tongue. She’s a lustily healthy baby. Two lactation consultants and a pediatrician examined her and pronounced her physically capable of breastfeeding. No, little stubborn girl just don’t wanna. When I finally jam a nipple into her mouth, she grunts and twists her head and even worse, sometimes bites down and then twists, which releases a string of obscenities from my mouth. And then she dares complain when milk sprays her in the face.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been suffering from clogged ducts, hard swollen lumps measuring 2 inches all around the breasts that finally loosened up only after two days of continuous, painful massaging while pumping.

And that brings us to my cloudy vision. This morning, I put on my contact lens, and as we were driving to the lactation support group, my eyes started fogging up. I thought something had gotten into my contact lenses. Everything I saw had white halos. When we got home, the first thing I did was take off my contact lenses, but the cloud did not lift.

“I can’t see,” I told David, as he was wrestling with Tov to get him into the tub to wash off what he’d randomly vomited in the car.

I poured eye drops into my eyes, rubbed, blinked. Still cloudy.

“I still can’t see!” I said, starting to get a little panicky. Meanwhile, the clock was telling me it was time to feed Woori again in 35 minutes, and I still haven’t had lunch, or pumped from the last session. And now I was going blind???

“It’s probably from lack of sleep,” David said, seeming irritatingly unconcerned.

“I’ve never had this happen before,” I said. The more I blinked, the more I closed my eyes, the foggier my vision became. I called the optometrist to get my eyes checked, and they made a 3 pm appointment for me.

I pumped. I forgot to eat lunch. I lied down in bed and closed my eyes for 20 minutes in a restless sleep of anxious dreams. Then my alarm clock went off: Time to feed Woori.

As I tried to unsuccessfully get Woori to breastfeed again, fighting through pain and stickiness and frustration, my vision started clearing. Huh. I guess David was right. My body was telling me I’ve hit an exhaustion point I’ve never reached before.

And even as I write this, Tov has skipped and galloped over to me several times, once again butt-naked, breaking my writing flow. He’s climbed onto my lap, rubbed his naked butt on my pants, and stolen three of my chocolate-covered pretzels. He’s claimed he needs to poo-poo, a clever manipulation to steal my attention for 20 minutes while we pointlessly sit at the potty, his butt and penis completely dry, but he thoroughly entertained while I read and sing to him.

But that’s newborn days for you. There’s chaos, fatigue, frustration, mind-numbing repetitive rituals, boredom. And then there’s precious rare moments of peace, beauty, wonder, thankfulness, sweetness, like the third time Tov ran over to me while I was writing, and then stopped to kneel down beside his little sister and nuzzle his face into hers. Or when Tov is napping, and David comes to lie down next to Woori who’s also sleeping, and gaze at her little wrinkly, piglety face. Or when I’m pumping while holding Woori to my chest, inhaling her natural fragrance, feeling her warmth match mine. Such moments are so fleeting, so glorious, a ray of heaven shining into the pit of hell, blasting all darkness and doom away.

So ask me how I’m feeling, five days in. And I’ll say: tired and thankful, frustrated and content, bored and delighted, a seemingly contradiction of emotions that actually meet and rise into this extraordinary, one-of-a-kind symphony of postpartum. It’s life on earth.

This is a time when no prayer seem trivial or silly. I’m not praying for world peace, or justice, or souls saved. My prayers are brief and simple but earnest, as real and raw as cracked nipples and toddler tantrums and a newborn baby who refuses to suck on the breast.

It’s the prayer David prays every evening during dinner these days: “Oh God, please help Woori suck.”