A year later, I visited a friend who had just given birth and found her crying with joy about how much she loved her baby and her husband. As a mutual friend said, “It’s like a roller coaster. We’re all experiencing the same thing, but it makes some people laugh and whoop with joy, and it makes other people cry with fear or puke.”
How the external circumstances of new parenthood will affect your mood might be easier to predict. If you are good at just being in the moment and taking your life as it comes, there can be a Zen-like quality to your days with baby. But say you’re someone like me—someone who likes the feeling of planning out your day, both what you’re going to accomplish and when and how you’re going to relax, and then executing that plan–then you will probably find that the long, aimless weeks of waiting on and reacting to your newborn are unsatisfying, frustrating, even depressing. You may find yourself a little weepy at the end of a cold, gray day in which you accomplished nothing but half a load of laundry, now moldering in the washer since the baby’s surprisingly early awakening from her morning nap. You may find yourself unreasonably irritable when your partner calls to say that he or she is going to be home from work thirty minutes late.
I was less weepy on the days when I got more done, when I felt more competent. I draw a lot of satisfaction from the experience of mastering a task, of figuring it out and doing it well, but the task of parenting a new baby changes so rapidly that it’s nearly impossible to feel any sense of mastery in those first few months. Everyone kept telling me that, when in doubt, I should tune into my “Mother’s Instincts,” but I didn’t really feel like a Mother yet. I had Instincts, but they just seemed to be the same ones I’d always had, like the very strong Instinct to make myself a cup of tea and watch The Wonder Years. These Instincts didn’t have much to say about parenting Rosie, and they were struck especially dumb when confronted with conflicting theories about childrearing. The hard-core attachment parenting ideologues said I should hold my baby all day (actually, it was worse: They said I should want to hold my baby all day), and I was pretty sure that was crazy, but what did I know? In the absence of loud and confident Mother’s Instincts, some new mothers find it helpful just to pick an ideology and follow it. I opted for the more balanced approach of allowing them all to make me feel equally inadequate.
This is excellent. Jody Peltason with “Before I Forget: What Nobody Remembers About New Motherhood” in The Atlantic. Cry on my shoulder any time, new mothers, any time. I remember everything. One of the reasons I have a category on this blog called “the first year of motherhood”.
blue milk 
I remember too. Vividly. I’m allergic to even considering another baby. Awesome article.
I’ve been reading around this blog and realised I have a different experience on becoming a new mother to anything I’ve seen expressed here. So to provide another perspective…Before my first child I was nearly completely bedridden for 8 years with chronic illness. Really isolated. I was determined that my new daughter would not suffer the isolation that came with my illness so with the help of family I made every effort I could to go to a mothers group. What I discovered was that while I was riding high on being ‘relevant’ and having a social status for the first time in my life (‘motherhood’ trumps ‘disabled unemployed’ in the social order) they were reasonably complaining of a loss of status from not doing paid work (‘workforce participation’ trumps ‘at home mother with baby’ in the social order). Also while they were experiencing social isolation for the first time I was experiencing an exhilarating new degree of social connection. What I didn’t say then and probably would have liked to is that for this generation of white, middle class mothers – who have had opportunities unprecedented for women in history – the struggle and alienation experienced with new motherhood offers a unique opportunity to understand not just their female forebears but those in socially marginalised groups too such as the long time unemployed, the disabled and refugees to name a few.
Really interesting comments. I have definitely developed much more of an affinity with disabled people since becoming a mother. Trying to get down the steps of the London underground with a toddler and stroller and hundreds of people hurriedly pushing past you and hoping, desperately, that someone will help you,can be a frightening experience. And I think people are much more willing to help mothers than they are disabled people.
The unfairness of new motherhood was what I found infinitely unsettling. The first few weeks when it’s just a blur and you’re not allowed to do much because of your c-section scar and he’s home from work, that’s okay. But the next few months where he goes back to work and you’re left with all the fucking colicky baby who doesn’t sleep like everyone else’s baby (and those parents of perfect babies have so much fucking advice for you, don’t they!), and you’re not splitting the workload evenly because he ‘has to concentrate at work and better that only one of us be sleep-deprived’. When he catches the slightly later bus home and doesn’t get back until 7pm and walks through the door and instantly asks you if you’ve made anything for dinner. When he gets jealous of the time you spend with your female relatives who make you cups of tea and snacks and perform free child care respite on demand, and of course on top of it he’s so fucking ungrateful towards these women who keep your head above water. When you start to make plans about shifting into a more equitable routine and workload, and he keeps putting you off because he gets to do less of the work and have more of the sleep that way.
I mean that’s on top of all the shit of actually parenting and breastfeeding a small fussy infant. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to re-live those colicky days. It wasn’t ‘worth it’, as everyone keeps wanting me to say. It was absolute hell and no amount of enjoying parenting him as a happy toddler is going to make me forget. *Shudder*.
These are wonderful comments, I am really enjoying and relating to your observations.
[…] New mothers, I still remember […]
Both my children were ‘high need’ babies who cried a lot and slept little. With the first I was a single parent and the second I was married, but pretty much felt like a single parent/may as well have been one. My daughters are 16 and 26 now. The younger one is Aspergers and still doesn’t sleep very well. The only advice I’ve given new mums is sleep whenever you get the chance and try and keep in your mind that the baby won’t be a baby for long. If you need to get housework done focus on laundry, dishes and tidying because they’re the only things that build up if missed out, everything else stays the same and can wait. But sleep, get it whenever you can because it is sleep deprivation that makes everything worse. If you don’t get any help from a partner it’s their fault, not the baby’s. When you have a baby you soon discover the flaws in a relationship.