Issue #52: Why nothing could have prepared me for motherhood
Reflecting on the newborn trenches
A weekly dose of tidbits, spanning food, recipes, health, wellness, fitness, nutrition, destinations, books, advice, ideas and musings. Let’s spark conversation.
to buy
There’s a gorgeous coffee shop in Gorey called Veranda, who have the best hand soap and moisturiser in their loos. It’s of such a premium calibre that I am flabbergasted they give it out to their patrons - and it’s not even nailed to the wall (that’s Jersey for you - uber trusting). The Peace range from Chapter Organics is simply the most heavenly scent I hath ever smelled. It would make a great gift for someone you love, but an even better gift for yourself.
to drink
I love a bougie, fruity espresso, but I don’t love spending silly amounts on small batch, specialty coffee, for my regular, everyday cup. Enter, Redber. We get our beans for about £19 per kg, which is insanely affordable for a great tasting espresso at home. I noticed pretty early on that full caff coffee does my newborn no favours whatsoever in the sleep department, so I’m fully on decaf, and this one is exceptional.
to make
After a lil low-fodmap experiment a few years ago, I’ve been making this granola bar recipe ever since. It doesn’t require any weird and wonderful ingredients, and you can play fast and loose with the ingredients - they always turn out great.
The newborn trenches, as they are affectionately known, have been gnarly. Extremely naively, in my pregnant state, I didn’t think early motherhood would be that hard. I (embarrassingly, now) imagined it would be a walk in the park. My mind was filled with warm, fuzzy fantasies of cuddles, pram walks, and effortless breastfeeding. The reality could not have been further from the ideal.
Motherhood hit me like a frigging freight train. You’re recovering from, quite possibly, the biggest physical ordeal your body has ever been through, at the same time as figuring out how to care for a helpless, teeny, tiny, very vocal infant.
I was desperate to leave the hospital once I had my baby, having spent far too many days there in labour. I simply wanted to go home. In the first 24 hours of Grace’s life, we didn’t get off to a great start on our ‘breastfeeding journey’, not managing to get that elusive deep latch. It was a group effort - I’d be surrounded by a mountain of precisely placed pillows, this tiny screaming newborn balanced on top, the midwife aiming nose to nipple, desperately trying to get it all to click, but we’d resort to defrosting a syringe of expressed colostrum I’d brought with me (thank god I’d milked myself in the weeks leading up to the birth). At the end of day two, we finally got a latch, but little did I know, it was a shallow one. It hurt like a bitch, and I thought that was to be expected - these nipples needed to toughen up, after all! She fed, and all was well. The midwives said I could go home.
That first night at home, in the wee hours, I called the midwifery unit in floods of tears, asking for help. I couldn’t get my baby to latch without the specific hospital pillow tower, and the support of the angelic midwife who had held my hand the most. They gave me all the advice around what to try next, but if all else failed, I should just come back in and spend another night or two on the ward, with their support. Such kindness made me cry even more.
We muddled through that first night at home, and in those first weeks, I found myself trying to survive hour by hour, like that man in Touching the Void, as he fights for his life on the tundra. I was in a permanent state of crisis, dreading every time she needed to feed. We nicknamed our bassinet, the Snuzpod, the Screampod. She would scream her little lungs out every time we attempted transferring her in it to sleep. The advice was all so deeply conflicting - you absolutely cannot leave your baby to cry (totes fair enough, leaving them to cry goes against every instinct you have). Sleep when the baby sleeps. The baby only sleeps on you, but you absolutely cannot fall asleep while holding your baby. You can’t pour from an empty cup, so be sure to look after yourself, and get some sleep. Feed on demand, every 2-3 hours, but if they need to cluster feed, aka, every 10 minutes, you must let them - they’re establishing your milk supply. It was all seemingly a completely impossible task. Grace would feed for 45-60 minutes, and this 2-3 hours between feeds is calculated from the start of one feed, to the start of the next. So for the first few weeks of a newborn’s life, you have about an hour’s window to sleep/eat/shower/fulfil your basic needs, but this baby isn’t able to be physically apart from you, so what on earth are you supposed to do?! Christian and I tag teamed being her body pillow, propping our eyes open with matchsticks, and we were like ships passing in the night. I barely saw him (though he fed me every single meal in bed, while I fed her). He literally did everything, from food shops to food prep, all laundry, cleaning, being my much needed emotional support, plus tag teaming caring for the babe. We did manage a few zombie walks as a three, and every time we got home, I’d think, what on earth was I thinking? I should have slept!
Those first few weeks were the wildest of times. The abject dread I felt as the sun went down every night was like this awful foreboding deep in my bones. What fresh hell would the night bring? I had a conversation with a non-parent yachtie friend while I was pregnant - we agreed that yachts had prepared us reeeally well for parenthood. We were used to being woken up in the middle of the night to fulfil a food order. We were used to being over-worked and under-rested. Pah! Lack of sleep on trip was nothing compared to this. More fool me.
A lil sprinkling of post-partum anxiety also makes actually falling asleep, when you do get the chance, hard, hard work. Christian would take Grace for a walk around the lanes, with a bottle of expressed breastmilk in case she got hungry before he got back. This was my chance to sleep. I would go into the spare room, lie on a towel (postpartum night sweats are no joke), block out the daylight with an eye mask, and attempt to sleep. My ears would be ringing, as if I’d been at a concert, my heart would be racing, and I could not, for the life of me, get to sleep. I felt pumped with adrenaline, my mind conjuring up images of all the horrible accidents that could befall Grace while she was out of my sight. It was torture. If I did nod off, I would wake up five minutes later in a complete panic, throwing off the cover and patting the bed, literally seeing the outline of my baby in the sheets, convinced I had fallen asleep while feeding her, and she had suffocated. Having spoken about this with my mum friends, this ‘baby in the sheets’ hallucination is extremely common, and I’m still blessed with it most nights. Christian’s used to getting frantically patted now.
As awful as it was, now, in week nine, the reality of those first few weeks are already starting to blur. We knew it would - everyone said it would - you just forget. You know how they say that when you learn something new, it’s while you sleep that you lay down what you learned in your long term memory? I think that new parents are so sleep deprived, you simply aren’t laying down any long term memories while you’re in the trenches. It has to be nature’s way of making sure we don’t all stop at one.
Loved this, thank you for sharing!