An Anxious Mom's Tips for the First Three Months

Amelia turned 5 months old this week which is absolutely insane to me. Where did those five months even go?

Since I kept both myself and Amelia alive (with lots of help, obviously) for five months, I figured that I can finally consider myself qualified to give other anxious moms some advice for getting through the first three months of life with a baby.

1. Get yourself some (real) mom friends. One of the most invaluable resources I had during the first few months was regular contact with several friends whose babies were of the same age as Amelia. But if you're anything like me, you need to find friends that you can vent to and who won't judge you for thinking that having a baby kind of sucks sometimes. Friends you can text in the middle of the night because they're awake too. I can't overstate how helpful it is to have someone outside of your situation that could understand the unique mixture of love, frustration, guilt, terror and dislike that come with having a baby.

2. Don't stress too much about habits. Before I had a baby I read a lot about getting babies to sleep, and while some of it was helpful most of it lulled me into a false sense of control over everything. The fact is, based on my experience and the experience of other parents I know, your child is born with certain sleeping habits. There are certain things you can do to help encourage some habits over others, but really the baby is going to call the shots. I swore up and down that I'd never cosleep, but in the middle of the night when I didn't want to sit in a chair for a 20-minute feed only to have Amelia's eyes spring open the second I put her down, suddenly I didn't really care about habits I might be creating. Survive day to day and don't stress too much about habits you may be creating down the line. You'll have plenty of time for consistency later.

3.  Live second by second, day by day. I tend to get really anxious when I feel trapped. I know "trapped" is a crappy word to use when talking about your flesh and blood that you created, but knowing that I am a mother forever and that my life has been permanently changed always overwhelms me if I think about it too long. For someone like me who gets far too caught up in the future, I found in the first months that it helped to focus only on what was right in front of me.

4. Pick a mantra. Many people who know me know that I have a secret love for cheesy-ass country music. When Amelia was in the throes of colic, I remembered a stupid country song called "You're Gonna Miss This," and I'd often repeat the chorus to myself: "you're gonna miss this/you're gonna want this back/you're gonna wish these days/hadn't gone by so fast." Maudlin and cliched and ridiculous, but I found that saying it to myself helped keep the whole thing in perspective--this time was temporary and short-lived, and she'd be older before I knew it.

5. Be clear about your needs. I still struggle with this. I often expected Rob to anticipate my needs without actually conveying them, which meant that I was almost always left feeling resentful and put-upon (it helps that I sometimes love being a martyr. Wife of the year). When I started feeling more comfortable telling him "I need a nap, can you watch the baby?" I found that he was more than willing to help.  This goes for people outside of your relationship as well--other moms are often incredibly enthusiastic to lend a hand if you ask for it.

6. Sleep when the baby sleeps, but do other things too. I hated hearing "sleep when the baby sleeps," because while it is great advice, I found that watching the laundry and dog hair pile up caused me more stress than sleep deprivation. I started carving out time to fold laundry, do dishes, vacuum. It was surprisingly relaxing to do something that didn't need me, that didn't scream at me, that didn't make me feel completely inadequate.

7. Go easy on yourself. Take care of yourself and keep yourself healthy, both physically and mentally. If this means giving up breastfeeding, go for it. If it means putting your darling child in daycare once they are old enough, do it. Mom guilt is impossible to escape, but try to give yourself permission to be a person too. You are no less of a parent for doing so.

So there you have it, some of the things that kept me sane for months 1-3. If you have any to add please feel free to do so in the comments!

Musings on Having a Fussy Baby

I thought when Amelia was born that who she was as a day-old baby was generally who she'd be for awhile.  By that rubric, she was the perfect newborn. She slept and ate like a champ and rarely cried. I wrote in her baby book that she "only cried when she was hungry" and Rob and I congratulated on each other on winning the baby lottery.

Then she turned 3 weeks old and it all fell the hell apart.

Colic hit her like a steam engine. She'd spend the day sleeping for the most part, but come 4:30 and she'd scream blood-curdling shrieks until at least 10:00pm. We'd dance, we'd sing, we'd try every device and liquid on the market to calm her.  At the appointment where we discovered her milk protein allergy, the pediatrician told me that it very well could be the source of her misery and that avoiding dairy could solve our problem completely. I cut dairy out completely and her stomach began to regulate, but the screaming continued.

And continued...and continued...and continued...

I loved (and love) my child with every stupid fiber of my being but I was finding it really hard to like her some days. With that came incredible guilt--guilt for not constantly enjoying the magic of having a baby, for thinking far too often about our life before her.

The colic eventually faded, but she was still incredibly fussy. She gave up the daytime sleeping and the majority of my day was spent trying to pull her back from the edge of crank. It was demoralizing, both because the screaming rang in my head as a constant reminder of my failure and because I hated that she hated life so much.

When you have a fussy baby you hear plenty of advice and lots of "it gets betters." While they were well-intentioned, it eventually got wearing since none of the traditional fussy baby advice worked for us:

Have you tried the swing? Amelia has tolerated her swing long enough to fall asleep exactly one time. Every other time she is impressed for approximately five minutes and then is ready for whatever is next, mother.

How about a pacifier? I've never heard of a kids who didn't like pacifiers until I had one. At this point I can only get her to take the pacifier when she's in the Ergo and her hands are pinned below her, as she brings her hands up to her face a lot and pops the pacifier out.

Take her for a ride in the car! I have also never heard of a baby who hated the car, but I have one. She tends to run warm which is part of the problem since carseats hold heat, but other than that I have no idea why a trip longer than five minutes makes her scream as though she's being torn limb from limb.

Put her in the carseat on top of the drier! Turns out this trick must have worked a lot better in the 1980s when driers vibrated a lot more. Our drier doesn't get warm on top nor does it vibrate enough for her to notice that anything's different.

The only thing that worked consistently was if I carried her around, dancing, with music. Remove any one of those factors and the screaming continued.

I remember reading a post written for new mothers that wished them the peace of a "mute button," something that would calm their child for even a few minutes. It seemed that my daughter had nary a one, or at least one that was easy and allowed me to do something aside from stare at her. She was thankfully a breeze come nighttime, if that counts as a mute button, but our days were incredibly long.

Along with the frustration of not being able to calm your baby comes a fear that something isn't right, either something physical or something...deeper. I'm not super proud of this but in the darkest, most frustrated moments I was worried that something was fundamentally wrong with my kid. That maybe she was the one child for whom it never would "get better" and that she was born just hating life and hating me. Before I had a kid, I remember assuring friends with similar fears that everything was surely fine. I remember wondering how they could ever actually worry about something so illogical.  Turns out when you are at the end of your rope, staring at a child in your arms that has been screaming non-stop for hours on end, your mind goes into some pretty weird places.

Luckily at around 4 months, the smiles became more frequent. We got a few laughs. We started to have days where both of those things outnumbered the screams, days where the hours of colic seemed a distant memory or another person's kid that someone told us about. I'm still not confident in my abilities as a mother by any stretch of the imagination but I figure we are learning together. I might not know how totally how to be a mom yet but Amelia sure as hell doesn't know how to be a person.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

If you are reading this and you have a colicky or fussy baby (I find many mothers are loathe to say the word "colic" for some reason. My hairdresser told me that her son was VERY close to having colic, which as my mom pointed out is like being "a little bit pregnant.") I won't tell you that "it gets better" even though it most assuredly does. When people told me things like "wait until 4 months/6 months/1 year, then it's totally different," they might as well have told me "it's really hard until they graduate college" for how far away it felt. All I can tell you is to take every day second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. Know you aren't alone, reach out when you  need to, and pick a safe vice (mine was Liz Lovely cookies heated in the oven).

I found that it also helped to find another parent with a similarly-aged child you can vent to, Someone you can text in the middle of the night, someone who won't judge you for saying things like "why does my husband WALK SO DAMN LOUD" and "THIS KID WON'T SHUT THE HELL UP," who doesn't return your vents with admonishments or humblebragging about how magical they find the experience. These parents will be invaluable. I don't know that I would've made it through months 1-4 without them.

Above all, remember that though babies are kind of dicks sometimes, your baby is not defective. There's a reason nature made them cute, and in the case of biological children, there's a reason they often look like the person you may have actually chosen to spend your life with.