One morning in early December 2012 I sent my husband on an errand to the pharmacy on account of my being about to get my period for days and days and days. When he returned I finished cleaning the bathroom and took the pregnancy test he faithfully brought home. I sat the stick on the mantle in our living room and watched to see the one line appear. Instead two lines appeared and from then on, for better or for worse, everything changed.
Having a baby is meant to be the most joyous occasion of your life. Throughout those nine months you idealise a picture of what motherhood is. I’m going to say that for me it was probably 5% what my mother told me it was like and 95% frosted round the edges tv portrayals of the heaven that is having and raising a baby. Just let me tell you, the television lied to me.
Fair enough though right? You wouldn’t really expect the television to give you the real deal when it came to what to expect. What I didn’t bargain for though was the way that NOTHING prepared me for the actuality that having a baby is much more difficult than anything you could ever imagine. I’d venture that I was fairly proactive in pregnancy to gain what I thought of as sufficient knowledge in order to tackle this new phase of my life with vigour and success. I bought the books, I read the blogs, I joined the online antenatal group and I attended both nhs run and nct run classes. I learned how to swaddle and how to hold. I analysed the ‘mother knows best’ parenting trap and accepted with relish that babies sleep is different to adults. I watched films of babies latching onto breasts, listened to crying and levered dolls into slings. By the time August came I was full to the brim of information on every aspect of birthing and childcare up to a year old. Or so I thought.
At 4am on the 31st of July I woke to my show and by 5am I was contracting. I slapped the tens on full of glee and we headed to maternity assessment to be checked out. Three more trips and 38 hours later and baby Sandy was lying on my chest eyeballing me. He looked out at me and it was like he had already got the lay of the land and was just surveying his realm. The midwife almost took him off of my chest because he was so calm she was worried. He gave a single cry to appease her and looked back at his adoring parents. And from that moment on nothing was ever easy again.
People always say those cliches that you ignore when pregnant then bat away when holding your newborn. ‘It’s not like the book says it is, is it?’ The smug midwife relays as you demand help from your screaming colicky bundle. ‘That’s just what they do’ repeats the nurse on the postnatal ward monotonously as you weep down the phone, well into your sixth consecutive hour feeding your new baby. ‘Think yourself lucky, I’ve had women with worse’ says the health visitor when you reveal that naps are now only thirty minutes long. But you expected all this, right? You knew you’d be sleep deprived and you were well aware that babies cry. So why does it feel so unexpected?
Some things are just different to how people explain them. People can tell you til their blue in the face that babies cry for several hours a day but its not until you are faced with just exactly how it is that your baby cries, and why, that you cotton on to it being a problem. A lot of things people forget. I can’t tell you the number of times my mother would say ‘oh yes, you did that too, it was awful’ only for me to say ‘well why didn’t you warn me?!’. And its not just anecdotal. The classes helpfully leave out the hard bits. They don’t bother to tell you you won’t be able to sleep when baby sleeps because baby sounds like a fright train transporting dinosaurs all night. And they leave out the bit about what happens when baby decides to just stop feeding. For no reason. Most of all they forget to mention that just when you think you’ve worked out what’s wrong, and taken action in your sleep deprived haze, the baby will change and something else will be wrong and you have to start all over again.
I think that all new mums find that no matter how much advice and guidance and training they do prior to the birth things are never as expected and the problems you experience are unlikely to match the problems of other mums you know, let alone the bloody book. With that in mind I’d like to introduce this blog as a source of completely subjective and anecdotal evidence of the things they don’t tell you before you have your baby, as well as the things that people you ask for help from later will probably either have forgotten or never have known.
I’m not going to lie, its so hard. I love my son I really do more than anything in the world and so indiscriminately that it hurts. With that in mind I won’t let this become a graveyard of hard times passed, rather a celebration of our babies lives underpinned with practical stories of issues tackled. There are a lot of things I wish I’d known could happen before I had him and I know I would have felt a lot more relaxed about dealing with the bad if I’d known it wasn’t just me and that it wouldn’t last forever. If there is one cliche that is accurate its that nothing remains the same for long.
Having a baby is accepting that life will be a schism of dizzying highs and soul destroying lows. All we can do is to ride them out, and hope to help others enjoy their little ones as much as possible by letting them know they are not alone.
Posts will be authored from a plethora of writers and if you would like to submit your own guest post to this blog I would really like to hear from you. Email submissions to kimichips@hotmail.com
In Sunshine and Shade 