start
As you mean to go on–negotiating the first few weeks
You walk (sorry, shuffle/stagger) out into the hospital car park and it hits you: this baby, the one you’re carrying now in his teeny car seat, in the outside world, is yours. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s also slightly terrifying. How can they expect you to look after him completely unaided? It’s the new-parent wake-up call and it happens to us all: life will–truly–never be the same again.
THESE ARE THE TOP TEN NEW-PARENT WORRIES:
1 | Will my baby die? (Yes, we all worry about it.)
2 | Is my baby healthy and normal?
3 | Am I doing it right?
4 | Is my baby eating enough/too much/at the right times?
5 | Is my baby crying too much?
6 | Is my baby sleeping too much/too little/at the wrong times?
7 | Will I ever feel like ‘myself’ again?
8 | Will my relationship ever recover?
9 | How are we going to afford this?
10 | Will I be a good parent?
This chapter is your basic guide to getting through–and hopefully enjoying–the first few weeks. This includes, of course, coping superlatively with all of the above worries.
Getting your baby home
THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS YOUR BABY WILL NEED FOR HIS DEPARTURE FROM HOSPITAL.
A car seat suitable from birth (see here)
Clothes: vest, Babygro, socks, cotton hat and cardigan (unless it’s hot)
A warm outer garment if it’s winter
A cellular or lightweight blanket if it’s summer, unless it’s hot. Use your common sense or, if this has deserted you, ask a midwife.
AND YOU WILL NEED:
Drugs. Take whatever pain meds you can get, at least forty-five minutes before you have to ‘walk’ to your car.
Clothes. No, no, the Diesel jeans won’t work–this season you’ll mostly be wearing elasticated waistbands in very large sizes.
Nerves of steel.
A good tip is to stuff your baby with milk and burp him well (see here for how) just before you leave. That way you can rule out hunger when he starts to yell (which he almost certainly will). Though your baby looks tiny, he’s relatively robust for someone that small. You’re in this together and if you want to enjoy the next few months you have–to a certain extent–to force yourself not to sweat the small stuff. From now, and for the foreseeable future, this is a very valuable thing to remind yourself of.
What to do when you get home
‘The whole world feels fragile now, as if I were carrying my heart around,’ says Melissa, mother of Raphael, nine months. If this throws you into a tizzy for the first few weeks, you’re not alone. ‘I felt total panic at home with my new baby,’ says Julia, mother of Charlie, one. ‘He seemed so fragile and the sense of responsibility was just overwhelming. Instead of gazing at my baby in this bubble of maternal love, I just kept thinking, He’s so important, what if something happened to him?’
Not everyone feels worried. But if you do, the anxiety should subside once you get to know your baby a bit and gain confidence. If it doesn’t, it’s important to talk to your midwife or health visitor about how you feel (excessive anxiety, apart from being distracting, can be a sign of postnatal depression).
The main thing is to get to know your baby. ‘He didn’t come with any instructions and I couldn’t speak his language,’ says Lori, mother of Jacob, two. ‘I felt like I was failing all the time.’ Be kind to yourself here. You will slowly learn–your way–that he won’t break if you put his nappy on wrong, or explode if you take too long to do his poppers up (though he may shout a lot). He doesn’t have some pre-programmed need to be held or spoken to in the ‘right’ way, and he doesn’t know any better than you do how he should be bathed or fed. The right way, in short, is your fumbling, inept, loving and slowly evolving way.
FIVE TOP TIPS FOR THE FIRST FEW WEEKS:
1 | Take a babymoon (see below).
2 | Get help (see below). Lots of it.
3 | Shelve all normal tasks: tidying, bill-paying and sending out birth announcements can all wait.
4 | Sleep whenever you get the chance (even a half-hour catnap is better than nothing).
5 | Only have visitors on your terms: ask people to leave, cancel their visits, only let them stay a very short time–normal sociability rules do not apply.
A word about visitors
Remember, it’s your baby and you are allowed to do things your way–no matter who you offend. Josie, mother of Kofi, fifteen weeks, remembers that her biggest difficulty during the early weeks was with visitors. ‘I often felt that they did not appreciate my need to be with my baby. With hindsight I should have been more assertive. I found it very hard to watch people pass Kofi from one person to another when I just wanted to hold and protect him.’
THE PAPARAZZI
There’s one thing most of us worry about that we needn’t: flash photography by the granny paparazzi is not going to hurt your baby’s eyes, induce epileptic fits or damage anything other than your sanity.
A babymoon
Your priority as a new mother should not be to slim yourself concave in the first four weeks. Your body and mind need to adjust and recover. A significantly better way to embark on motherhood is to have a ‘babymoon’. Just snuggle up with your baby and do little else but eat, sleep and feed for a good week after the birth.
TO HAVE THE IDEAL BABYMOON:
Stay in your pyjamas for at least three days.
Have lots of skin-to-skin contact with your baby (this is a great thing for dads to do too, but is particularly important for the mother if she is breastfeeding).
Eat meals you have cooked and frozen already. You want things that can be reheated quickly and don’t require accompaniments–one-pot meals such as soups and stews that include veggies. They should preferably be heated up (and cleared away) by someone else.