Baby Lauca on the back of the plane.
In the first year of motherhood I got quite run down by about the four month mark. Bill was working incredibly long hours and the weeks of being home alone with a colicky baby were beginning to accumulate. The crying stage, it went on and on. We had passed the six week milestone, we’d passed the three month milestone, and we were rapidly heading to the six month milestone and still there was no ‘let up’ in this colic thing. One hundred and twenty days, and counting, of crying. My mother was living interstate at the time and she invited Lauca and I to stay with her for a week. I was somewhat nervous – the logistics of packing for a week away with a new baby, flying for the first time with her, and then being apart from Bill and his middle-of-the-night assistance.
But, in fact, it was a week of pure bliss. My mother quieting my baby daughter in front of the fireplace during ‘witching hour’. My mother taking my baby from me after the pre-dawn feed so I could ‘sleep-in’ until dawn. My mother inviting us for walks along the beach. My mother making tomato soup for me. My mother buying my baby new clothes. After that week was up I flew home restored.
Bill met me at the airport; we were all delighted to see one another. And then something went wrong and we had an argument in the airport carpark. I felt all the perspective and recovery and joy acquired over that week drain out of me and like a puddle at my feet it seeped into the bitumen and was gone. It was the worst kind of wastage I could imagine.
My god, the first year is hard.
And yet we get through it and some of us do it again, and others again and again. I think there must be a powerful forgetting agent in 1st birthday cakes or something. To all new mums in the first year – you will make it, you are doing a great job.
This is my story – just swap the plane trip for a four hour car trip which I did solo, I still don’t know how I managed to stay alert enough to drive.
I’m now ten months into baby #2’s life. The story is different this time. We had five months of blissful, sleeping and contented baby. Followed by five months and counting of night time wakings and feeds, and an inexplicably unsettled baby.
It was hard the first time around, but this time with a nearly three year old as well there is just no let up. I ‘know’ it passes, but at 3am in utter exhaustion I just don’t believe that, it feels like I will never have a full night sleep again.
It’s not a timely thing, but I would hug you if I could, because oh! I’m sorry, and oh! I feel you.
Oh I feel your pain. It’s been such a big learning for me with my first baby being a fractious one (and now sensitive toddler).. realising over time how this makes your parenting experience SO different from others. I have a friend who’s first baby did not cry for 6 months!!!!! now she has a 2nd baby who ocassionally looks sad which distresses my friend so much she bursts into tears!! (mind you she’s sleep deprived, so all odd behaviour is excused). anyway my youngest (less fractious) baby is almost 10 months…i am hanging out for the year mark. pity this time of easing will also coincide with getting back into the workplace…so i can begin the guilt about daycare yadda yadda..boring..
One of the reasons I blog is because I don’t know that I’ll remember anything from my 2nd child’s first year. The sleep deprivation is a killer. I’m going to visit my mother at the end of the month. To be honest, I’m dreading it. I don’t expect to get help, I expect to get judgement. The “you’re doing everything wrong, if you would just turn into me your baby would sleep perfectly well and everything would be honky dory” kind of judgement. bleh. So glad you got a bit of help when you needed it.
Oh, the weeks my grandmother was dying and we drove 3-4 hours (sometimes 5, because of stopping to nurse twice – and of course everyone ELSE remembers their 4 and 5 month old baby as sleeping blissfully through every car trip, so how could it take me so long to get there?) and the one that was an hour farther, to see my mother, and he cried for the entire hour, just terrified, back there in the rearfacing seat, in the dark, alone, on a rural highway with no safe shoulder to stop on.
The good parts are just sort of a sleepy, nursing, endorphin blur, but some of the bad ones stand out sharply in memory.
Yeah, that first year is hard, and that first year, first time is especially hard. Good to remember these things, because I am constantly in danger of romanticising how gorgeous and easy the first year is, when they don’t whinge, bicker, bite you and other people….
I wish there was a way to parent your first child with the mind-set, skills and general relaxation you bring to parenting your second child. Because by the time you have your second child (if you do) you have a whole different set of challenges, dealing with the toddler and the competing demands and the jealousy and the non-synchronised nap-times.
My own version of this is the four separate gastros and eight colds my son brought home from daycare in the second six months of his life.
Two memories:
1. lying in my bed feeling the onset of the gastro that had rendered my husband, who could not even remember the last time he’d vomited from illness, so incapable of self-care he’d forgotten to drink water, and crying and wondering if we should call child protection to come and take the baby away in case I got too sick to lift him. (Everyone thinks they want to help a mother in trouble, until that trouble is gastro, and then no one will come near you or your baby.)
2. lying in bed at my parents’ house, the visit which was supposed to be psychic recovery from the gastro (probably the round after the round above). Co-sleeping with a distressed sleepless baby, as hot as a little kettle with a fever. Awake and burning with pure rage that the baby and the husband had got to sleep and I yet again had insomnia.
I woke up my husband and said “I quit, I quit, I quit, if he cries you take care of it” and my husband said “OK” and I went into the next room and slept for four hours by myself and it was amazing. (And then a day later the fever and the cough were bad enough that an emergency department considered x-raying for pneumonia, but anyway. It was a good four hours.)
…………………
Sometimes I think I found the second year harder, but that’s only in terms of the baby’s personality. In terms of surrounding circumstances, the first year was harder.
Oh Rosa, the fractious car trips… my little one screamed nonstop in the car as a newborn, until he gradated from a capsule to a convertible seat (sudden reflux relief, poor wee mite!).
Then, when he was about two, I remember a five-hour drive that didn’t go too badly for the first three-and-a-half hours… followed by ninety minutes of singing Old MacDonald Had A Farm. Nonstop. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel, animal-wise, pretty early on, and we just couldn’t stop, since our unhinged and increasingly desperate singing was better than the screaming that started if we stopped singing.
And then there was the (thankfully shorter) other drive to relatives when he was about eighteen months old, in which the only thing that amused/soothed him was us loudly shouting “SPLAT!” at regular intervals.
Have I mentioned how much I adore my nine-year-old? Have I?
I figured out – after the fact, of course – that all the “I don’t know, my baby loves the car!” folks were taking half hour drives, not 5 hour ones. Or were my parents age, when you put a blanket on the floor of the car & lay the baby there. I remember the warmth & soothing noise of riding down there, myself.
And, yes, the best virtue of mothering a baby was not being pregnant anymore, and the best virtue of the six year old is that he is no longer a baby. Every time I get misty-eyed and think “maybe another one?” my partner says “God, no! Why do you want to start all over now that it’s gotten good?!”
lauredhel: my current trick is reciting children’s picture books from memory. (He’s flipped back and forth between blissful car sleeper and screamy car hell raiser.)
My son is three months old and has started to settle down a bit only in the last few weeks. I read your post on mothering a newborn right in the midst of all that. Just wanted to say – love your writing, I’m never disappointed after a visit to bluemilk.
I just found your blog through Avi’s piece at Ms.! I’m so glad I did.
When my niece was about three months old, I went to Australia to help my sister care for her baby girl. (We’re American but she taught at a university there for a few years.) The first year with that baby was hard on both her parents–no one used the word “colic” because she didn’t cry for “no reason” but she cried a whole lot. She knew what she wanted and she wanted it now and she didn’t care if we were in the car, she wanted to be held, darn it! I think I racked up some good karma points just bringing my sister a flat white, made extra hot so that it would still be warm when I made the walk back to the house; my sister said it couldn’t be done. Ha! She had her coffee. And it was beautiful, the look on her face.
After two months of Australian living, I helped her move from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Her husband had gone ahead to set up their apartment, so it was just the three of us and a whole lot of luggage. That move was one of the hardest things I’ve ever watched anyone do, ever. And, like your mom, I knew that my job was to fetch, carry, take orders and repeat to myself “this is not about me.” I still thank God that the baby slept for more of the flight(s).
Yes, and seldom do people talk about the strain a new baby can put on relationships. My partner and I are always honest when people ask how the first year is or when people ask our advice about having a child – because no one said it to us – and in the moment we thought we were totally fucked.
[…] motherhood […]
[…] Running on empty post on the difficulty of the first year of parenting has prompted this post about the first year […]