Hey, mamas, you remember having a newborn, right? Sure, you say.
I’d like to challenge that.
Do you really remember? Or are your memories selective — kissing your baby’s forehead, snuggling, proudly showing off your little sweet potato to friends and relatives — focusing only on the good? I know mine were… until my husband and I started trying for our second baby.
In a few days, I’ll take a pregnancy test, and it’ll be different than the first time around. When we were trying to get pregnant with our first, my heart fluttered with anticipation as the testing day neared. I hoped beyond hope for a positive test, knowing I would be absolutely crushed if the results were negative.
Now, I would say I’m pleasantly anticipating a positive test, but if it’s negative, I’m also mostly OK with that. Because as much as I want another child, a sibling for my daughter, and another angel to shower with love, I’ve also been unearthing some memories of the newborn and baby stages that I’m soooooo not looking forward to revisiting.
Number one has to be the lack of sleep
How am I gonna deal with that again when I barely made it out the first time? Another is diapers. Haven’t had to deal with those in about two years. And what about returning to work after the paltry six-week maternity leave (unpaid, I might add, even though I am a salaried employee with a Master's degree — thanks, America)? Pumping breast milk on the job? Ugh. Yeah, nothing says awesome like having to get partially nude in some closet at your place of work.
The more I think about it, though, a lot of the pains of the newborn/infant/baby stage were rules and expectations that I brought on myself due to pressure from a number of directions in my life. Let’s start with sleeping. When I was pregnant with my first, I read just about every book on the market. So many insist that co-sleeping is a bad idea, that your marriage/sex life will suffer, that you have to create the perfect bedtime routine or your baby will, like, I dunno, explode or something. Swaddle like this, use a white noise machine, get the lavender-scented lotion, etc., etc., etc.
This time around, I’ve got a crazy idea: How about I put the baby in a crib right next to my side of the bed?
That way, when my little nugget is hungry, I can just pop ‘em out and pop in the nipple? Our 5-year-old is in our bed almost every night anyway after a certain time, so what’s another addition to our little beddy-bye party? At this point, I’m gonna do whatever I need to do to make sure I’m getting as much sleep as possible. And if my bedmates don’t like it, they can go out to the couch, because I’m the one doing all the work here!
Speaking of breastfeeding, you would not believe (or maybe you’ve experienced it, and you do) the amount of pressure on women to breastfeed. And not just to breastfeed some of the time — no, all the time. There’s a lot of messaging out there that formula is evil and your baby will be sickly and not as smart as their peers if you let them drink it. I spent a lot of time awake in the middle of the night, or stripped to the waist in my classroom, pumping breast milk.
The first few days of my daughter’s life were excruciating
I was exhausted from labor, and she wasn’t latching, which made it impossible for anyone to sleep since she wasn’t getting what she needed. But I was so brainwashed by the propaganda that I wouldn’t let a bottle touch her lips lest she prefer it over the biological nipple. If only I’d just been OK giving her some formula once in a while!
Let me be clear — breast is best. This is scientifically proven and universally accepted. But guess what? You're not going to irreversibly damage your child by giving them formula once in a while — or even all the time. When I went back to work, I pretty much dried up because I hated pumping on the job so much. I had to give my daughter breast milk I’d already frozen, plus formula. And guess what? She turned out fine. This time around, I’m going to feed the hungry baby however I can, whenever I can, instead of making things harder on myself.
Lastly, I'm not pressuring myself to keep up with household chores
If I have a newborn, I’m not doing the dishes every day. I’m not doing everyone else’s laundry. I’ll help when I can, and I want to help. But having a clean house is going to be pretty far down on my list of priorities, and if anybody has a problem with that (hey, hubby!), they can get up and take care of it themselves. I remember doing dishes the day after getting home from the hospital, still hobbling around from the stitches in my hoo-ha. Yeah, no, that is absolutely not happening this time.
Here’s a novel thought — maybe we should ditch the ridiculous expectations we place on mothers outright, so they don’t have to learn the hard way, like I did? Now wouldn't that be nice…
