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Friday, September 4, 2015

First Three Months

I'm writing about a quarter of a year at once. So not my pre-baby writing frequency! Argh. My laptop hardly ever comes out anymore.

The first few days at home were so peaceful compared to what we'd dealt with at the hospital all weekend. My mother stayed with us for two weeks and my wife was off of work those same two weeks. We were a great team. My wife cooked dinners when we didn't have any from kind friends and family. She went out to the stores to get anything we needed. My mother helped with laundry and dishes and watched the baby so I could get in a nap, just calling me if she woke and needed to eat. Ellis slept most of the time, and in those first few days would sleep wherever I put her. So I did a lot of what I used to do. I went on my computer, I called friends at work because I missed my old normal, and even checked some work emails. But having time for all that was very short-lived.

I had a really hard time with my "normal" being totally upended. It just seemed to happen so fast. I had just been sitting around in my usual environment, calm and even bored that first week of my maternity leave that started on my due date, and now baby stuff was everywhere and I felt emotionally and mentally and physically exhausted and I could never clock out of this job and everyone at my OLD job was going on without me and I couldn't leave the house and my nipples hurt and I was "on call" all night long, falling asleep in the rocker while hanging over my nursing baby. I vividly recall how strange I felt, how everything around me felt strange. It was like this wasn't my home anymore, and this wasn't my life, and I was in some strange reality that I couldn't get out of. I would freak out and melt down and cry, telling my mom and wife about these feelings and texting with my sister and my best friend. I was very open with what I was going through because I was even more afraid of being isolated in these feelings. Dealing with very little sleep made my emotions particularly raw and made it much more difficult to cope.

That started to pass after about a week, and I got into our routine. But our routine was rough. Ellis had seemed so laidback in the hospital. She only fussed when something was wrong, and we seemed to be able to figure that out pretty quickly and then she was okay. Now she seemed to be fussing more often than not, and we couldn't figure out why or how to help her. When she fell asleep, I lived in fear of her waking back up. We had nursing down pat, but if that didn't help her, I was at a loss as to what else to do. Nothing else seemed to come naturally.

Nights were the hardest. Every evening we spent hours and hours trying to get her to bed, walking her up and down the block as she screamed and wailed because being outside soothed her a bit, but then she'd become agitated again once she came in. We followed what we'd read about helping babies distinguish night from day. We gave her a routine and kept our room dark and quiet at night. When she'd be awake from, say, 2:30-4:00AM, I wouldn't play with her, but would just hold her and be with her so she would learn nighttime wasn't play time. I've also read that breastmilk helps them make this adjustment more quickly because your milk at night is different and the same hormones that help you sleep helps the baby sleep. She figured out night from day pretty quickly, but was awake at least every hour or so. She was very sensitive to wet diapers and would scream the second she felt it. She was hungry all the time. She had gas and couldn't figure out how to pass it.

It's all such a blur now, I know we felt closer than ever the first two weeks when my wife was home. We'd be up in the middle of the night together trying to soothe Ellis and get her back to sleep, and we felt like such a team after any success. I know our relationship suffered for a while after my wife went back to work so soon; I was home alone ready to pull my hair out or jump out a window, while she started dreading coming home because she missed any of Ellis's good time during the day and just got there in time to experience the evening hell. It took a toll on us, and we started developing different ideas of how we should respond to her. We couldn't agree on it, and ultimately my preferences trumped hers because I was the one home dealing with her all day, and I couldn't do that 24/7 in a way that didn't feel right to me. So my wife got on board reluctantly because she didn't want us to send Ellis mixed messages, and we found ways to compromise where possible.

Ellis wanted to be held all the time, and I loved this most of the time until it made other things more difficult. I loved spending my day with her sleeping on my chest; it helped re-solidify our bond after hours of my nerves being utterly frayed. But when I wanted to shower or throw in a load of laundry, it was very difficult. She would scream the second I put her down and I felt guilty that I was home all day but unable to get much done, and that my wife would have to come home from a long day at work to a screaming baby, a crying wife, a messy house, and no dinner.

All of this passed, and more quickly than I'd dared hope. We turned a corner around five weeks, and it's only gotten better since. We developed a bedtime routine that worked for us; it still took us hours to get her to sleep (now it takes just about one hour), but suddenly we weren't having to take her outside pacing up and down the block anymore. Suddenly she was fussing and slapping at my chest as she nursed to sleep, but not screaming bloody murder throughout the house.

Looking back on those early weeks, I learned this:

Our struggle with Ellis was not unique; nothing was wrong with her or us. Newborns are fussy. Newborns need to be held. Newborns are gassy and they don't know how to pass it or what that scary feeling is. They aren't familiar with the feeling of a wet diaper and it upsets them. They can't see six inches in front of their face so they panic if they're set somewhere and can't see you. They've only known the warmth and close comfort of your womb, and can't be expected to be able to sleep on their own without the comfort and safety of your smell and your skin and your voice. A parent's job is to accommodate these needs to the extent that you can until they begin to adjust to the world.

It helped to hear from other new parents that the nightly crying ("witching hour") is normal among all babies, that all babies have a tough time adjusting to the world outside the womb and there's nothing wrong with your baby; you just had no idea how much they cry and how difficult it is for you to cope with that when you're exhausted and drained. You just can't anticipate it, no matter how much people might warn you (and they generally don't!).

It helps now for me to know this really doesn't last forever, and that babies go through their stages of growth and development without you pushing it. Ellis needed to be in bed with us the first month because she freaked out if she couldn't see and smell us. She felt utterly unsafe and alone in the bassinet. But soon she started to see and recognize her surroundings, and now she actually sleeps better in the bassinet. I bring her into bed to nurse so that I can get sleep, but I often end up putting her back in the bassinet at the next wake-up because she wants to stretch out flat on her back with her limbs akimbo more than she can do when squeezed in next to us. Bedsharing is for my convenience with breastfeeding, not because she needs it anymore. She used to only be able to nap on me, and would almost always wake up if I tried to transfer her elsewhere. The past three days, she's had at least one nap a day where she can't get comfortable on me and squirms and fusses til I set her down, at which point she is able to be soothed to sleep if I stay nearby keeping eye contact and making shushing sounds. I follow her lead and try to facilitate her growth as it's happening rather than trying to force her into a stage she's not ready for or keep her in one I'm not ready for her to grow out of. Trying to make her sleep on her own before she was ready would do nothing but keep us in an exhausting battle that distressed both us and her, and I'm glad I insisted on bedsharing while it worked for us.

I knew a lot of this theoretically, and would remind myself and defend it to others who I didn't feel were supporting my choices. But my confidence was not as strong as I attempted to project, because really I didn't know how any of my choices would turn out. Now I can see that she has developed a secure attachment to us, and because of it, is becoming independent more quickly than I'm even ready for! She knows we will do our best to meet her needs, that we won't just leave her to scream and cry when she's unhappy or lonely or scared, so she feels capable of being more adventurous. She spends more time doing things on her own (being set down in a bouncer or playing under her activity gym) because she knows we'll respond when she tells us she's done or needs something else. My choices have been exactly right for us, and I regret anytime I veered from it out of pressure from others or self-doubt. It's the only reason I would wish it upon myself to go through that rough first period all over again, so that I could do it with more confidence!

"If I knew then what I know now..." Isn't that what parenting is for everyone?