You and Your New Baby. Anna McGrail
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him straight out again. But Tina had put him in, so I didn’t. She already seemed to know what was best because she’d been with him all the time in the hospital and I hadn’t.’
First days
YOU MAY BE new to the job and feel that you’re dependent on ‘experts’ but no one knows your baby as well as you already do. It is surprising how quickly we learn to read our baby’s signals, even when we may have had little to do with babies before. It is astonishing how much our instincts are right, and perhaps in itself this may give us confidence.
Philippa’s baby’s umbilical cord hadn’t quite healed properly: ‘So the midwife didn’t discharge us at ten days like she was supposed to and I was really disappointed by that. I wanted to move on, and I felt this was holding us back in some way. I wanted the reassurance that everything would be alright, but I also wanted to take on the responsibilities myself.’
With that responsibility, though, however much it is wanted and welcomed, can come uncertainty, as Sally clearly knows: ‘My brain has gone. It sometimes feels like a big empty space in my head where I used to do thinking. I don’t even look at newspapers any more because they don’t make sense. Or if I do pick up a newspaper, I always seem to find things in there that upset me, and more and more things upset me now. I end up crying over news stories. It feels much safer, in a way, just having me and Kevin in our little world.’
Umbilical clip.
THIS INSTINCT to nurture and protect, almost to make a ‘nest’, is very strong in many parents in the first weeks of their baby’s life. For some people, this ‘nesting’ instinct began to manifest itself in late pregnancy with an urge to repaint the spare bedroom. If, during late pregnancy, your nesting instinct prompted you to do something slightly more practical, like freeze a month’s worth of nutritious dinners, then you will be more thankful now than you could ever have believed. This is because, when your baby arrives, something odd seems to happen to time.
For Gillian the change was dramatic: ‘Life is so slow now, that’s the thing I can’t get used to. It takes all day to do anything. It’s ten in the morning and I’m still in my dressing-gown and the baby’s having her third feed of the day and I’m wondering if I’m ever going to be able to get dressed and get to the shops. And yet, because there’s never a moment to do anything or finish anything, it’s all packed in so tight and the time rushes by. What happens to it? This is the thing they don’t tell you.’
The rhythm of life is very different in these early days. Some parents adjust to it almost at once; others find the change of gear much more difficult to accept. Rose felt nothing could prepare her for how she would feel: ‘I found the first few weeks very difficult. Life was so different to how I imagined it was going to be, and so different to everything I’d ever experienced before, that I felt like I’d been thrown in the deep end and was going to drown, while all the time I smiled and everyone thought I was paddling along happily. I loved him, I loved him but I wasn’t enjoying him.’
As Yvonne points out, your daily pattern does change but sometimes it can seem slow to do so: ‘At about three months I thought I’d start giving Andrée some carrots mashed up or something, potato, things like that, and I gave her tiny amounts on the end of a teaspoon and she would spit some out and enjoy others, and I liked that, watching her decide. But more than anything I liked having something different to do. It felt like every day was going to be the same. Baths, feeds, nappy changes, showing her books … apart from the baby clinic, where they had a mother-and-baby club afterwards, there was nothing to make one day different from another. I might do a trip to the shops one day, a walk to the woods another. But that was it. I needed to feel that we were going to move on, that Andrée wasn’t always going to be totally dependent on me in this way, and I think those first teaspoonfuls of carrot were one way of reminding myself of that.’
For some parents, the surprise is how much they take to parenthood, as Rachel happily remembers: ‘The one thing that I wasn’t prepared for is how lovely it would be. And I didn’t realise how happy I would be. People just don’t tell you that. When you’re a mother, you don’t find yourself saying to other mothers, “Isn’t this wonderful?” You find yourself saying, “Are Pampers or Boots nappies better?” So I didn’t know how absolutely wonderful it would be. There is a negative side, because I also didn’t realise how much my life … well, how unselfish you have to become. You always have to put the baby before yourself. You stop doing things you enjoy doing because the baby comes first. But I enjoy feeling that she depends upon me. It makes me feel very special.’
Amanda likes parenthood too: ‘People always seem glad to see you when you’ve got a baby. When you’re out shopping, people come over and talk to you and can be really friendly. I enjoy the days, just me and the baby.’
OTHER PARENTS will be surprised at how unhappy they suddenly feel, often for reasons they cannot quite articulate.
Beverley had a difficult delivery, forceps, 23-hour labour, pethidine: ‘It was really awful, and that did make a difference to how I felt afterwards, without a doubt. At least for the first, I should think the first four weeks, although I wouldn’t have been considered clinically depressed, I was suffering from some sort of depression, shock, whatever. I just couldn’t relate to Josh at all. People would say, “Oh, isn’t he lovely? Doesn’t he look great!” And I’d think, “Well, no.” It wasn’t until he was about four weeks old that I wanted to spend any time cuddling him, and then I did start to feel better. Also, because it was a traumatic birth, he was quite a whingey baby, and I didn’t really like him. I kept wanting to put him down. I think my husband got very depressed around that time as well. He used to say, “I don’t feel the way I thought I’d feel about Josh.” And I’d say, “Neither do I.” It was quite weird, and really horrible.’
DIFFERENT PEOPLE will tell you different stories about parenthood, but only you can know how you really feel: ‘People kept saying to me when she was tiny, “Oh, make the most of it, this is the best time.” And I thought it was the most dreadful time of my life. I thought, “If this is the best time, how am I going to cope when things get worse?” Then I met someone else who felt the same way, and her baby was slightly older, and she said to me: “This isn’t the lovely time, this is the horrible time. Things do get better.” And that was such a relief. Not everyone thinks it’s good, that very early bit, though you get so wrapped up in it.’
Baby blues
BABY BLUES do seem fairly universal. That is to say, they have been suffered by women in all cultures and all times when their baby is very tiny – usually around three or four days after delivery, when hormone levels drop and milk production kicks in. They are often linked with a sense of physical and emotional anticlimax after the birth. Nurses will often dismiss your tears with the label ‘three-day blues’, which is of no help when you can’t stop crying.
This is something Helen tried to explain: ‘The day Jo and I came out of hospital was very exciting. I was so glad to be home, and so pleased to sleep in my own bed again. But the next morning my breasts were enormous and solid, Jo was fretful, and everything just seemed to fall apart. I started crying and crying and didn’t really know why. I felt odd but I didn’t feel sad. The tears just came out of nowhere.’
THE FACT that these blues are so common, and always happen at around the same time, leads many experts to think that one of their causes is hormonal, though this explanation may not be much comfort.
‘I was sobbing and sobbing, though if someone had asked me why I’d have been hard pushed to tell them, and the nurse said, “Oh, a lot of you go through this – you’ll feel better tomorrow, believe me,” and that just made it worse. I thought, “How do you know?” I felt so unhappy, I couldn’t see myself ever smiling again. It all just seemed so pointless.’
Baby blues, whatever their cause, are usually