The lie started with the birth announcement: “We are already very much in love.” This was the script; what we were supposed to feel. We were very much in love, weren’t we?
It was a hot night in July. I attached two photos—one of me with the baby, one of her with my husband, selected from the 75 or so we’d already taken with our new camera, bought especially for this event, as though nothing before had been worth capturing—and sent it off.
It might have been 6 pm or 11 pm, I don’t know. We were new parents, and time had already lost its predictable thread. We had just returned from the hospital and despite the fact that I should have been nursing or sleeping, I was determined to let everyone know our daughter had arrived.
She was 12 days late, and when you’re that overdue, friends and family stop masking their impatience. My aunt joked that I should have had twins (which run in my husband’s family) because “they would have come sooner!” Many people wrote to ask, “Have you had the baby yet??????” (always with multiple question marks), or worse: “Why isn’t she here yet?” Like I knew. My father, who had arrived with my mother ten days before my due date, took to sighing when I waddled up to dinner, holding his granddaughter hostage.
On Day Ten I stopped communicating with everyone but my husband and midwife. That night, my contractions started.
After 26 hours of labor, I had dilated only one centimeter. We hadn’t planned on a doctor, but everything was going wrong. She strode into the laboring room in jeans and a billowy blouse, stuck her hand way up inside me, and, like everyone else, said, “Where’s the baby?”
An epidural and two hours of Pitocin made just one more centimeter of difference, so after I blearily signed my consent, half a dozen nurses swarmed me, poking my arms and spine with needles and shaving my pubic hair and putting a cap over my hair and numbing my belly and legs. When they rolled me down a long series of hallways—it was the middle of the night—I started shaking uncontrollably.
On the operating table the midwife held my cheeks to keep my teeth from chattering. They cut the baby out within ten minutes and my husband took her to the sauna, where she rooted at his nipple. I was left shivering on the table while they sucked out the amniotic fluid with what sounded like a vacuum cleaner. When I started to panic, they gave me a sedative.
I spent the early part of that first night at home—the night I sent out the birth announcement—crying so hard that my midwife ordered my husband and baby out of the bedroom so that I could get six consecutive hours of sleep, rest I hadn’t had since my contractions started eight days earlier. I felt so negligent—so convinced my milk wouldn’t come in, so convinced that I was “burdening” my husband with the care of our daughter—that I snuck into the living room where he was sleeping with our tiny girl on his chest and attempted to lie down beside them. We barely fit, which suddenly seemed an apt—if heavy-handed—metaphor. I tried to rest my head on his shoulder, where it had always simply belonged, but our baby was taking up most of the space, and my C-section made it hard to lie on my side. I could barely keep myself from falling off the couch.
My tears and snot made a puddle on my husband’s shirt. I missed him, my husband, the person I loved more than anyone—or had before the baby’s birth. I felt as if I had already lost him to the baby. Not that he loved her more, nothing so Oedipal had happened, but simply that our twosome was no longer only ours. Even if I could get him in a room alone, which wouldn’t happen for some time, I couldn’t have him completely, psychically, to myself any longer; she would always be there.
We had said our vows only a year earlier, but we were now, in an instant, just as committed to someone else for life. Or as a friend who, also at 35, gave birth to her first child, said to me days after her son’s arrival, “I’ll never not be a mother. Horror.”
Of course it wasn’t that I didn’t love—or want—my daughter. It wasn’t that I hadn’t planned the pregnancy. It was that the baby’s arrival was not just joyous—indeed I will never forget the howl my husband let out when the midwife brought our bundle around the curtain—but decimating. A bomb had fallen in the middle of my marriage; a perfect, wanted bomb, but a bomb nonetheless. What I really wanted to write on that birth announcement was, “I love my daughter, I am so grateful she is healthy and safe, but I miss my husband terribly. There is a hole in my heart where our twosome once was. What have we done?”
It’s been only a few months but I can now say that I love our daughter with a ferocity and fragility that terrifies me. I feel that thing you’re told you’ll feel—that before you have kids you can’t experience this depth of heart-exploding, do-anything-for-you-without-question love. When she flaps her arms in excitement when I reach into her crib in the morning, I momentarily forget that I had a life that meant anything to me before her arrival. Now I know that I will be very, very lucky if I am “never not a mother.”
Still, I haven’t so much gotten used to her being here as adapted, although “adapt” sounds like I’ve made the switch from whole milk to soy because it’s better for my cholesterol. New motherhood is a fast highway going somewhere you’ve never been—unfamiliar scenery, sometimes dull, sometimes stunning—with no map, no street signs and no stoplights. Like all new mothers, I just do, and the doing is endless and constant and choice-less and looks like nothing I’ve ever called doing, the tedium and physical demands coupled with surprising pockets of ecstasy.
For a long while I would wake to her crying at 3 am and not register that she was mine; that it was I who was supposed to do something. Does that part ever really sink in, I wrote to my Mom friends. That this is your baby? Your life?
But I cannot afford to think too hard about any of this.
My thoughts turned dark a few weeks in, when all she did was sleep, cry, eat and dirty her diapers. I wondered whether we should have waited. I felt too young to be a mother, and yet we started trying because I was almost entirely too old.
Scenes of our early courtship tormented me—after knowing him for barely six months, I had moved to Europe to be with my soon-to-be husband, leaving a life in New York I had cultivated for 12 years. In the two years we’d been together, we had lived in three countries, spending most of our time with no one but each other, needing little else. When our daughter was born, I’d look at her and feel immeasurable guilt for wanting that time back.
How could I love someone so much and also want to return to a world without her—a world that can no longer even exist in my imagination because the very fact of her being crushes the fantasy? To my husband I said, “I love her so much but I miss you.” My husband, ever the pragmatist, replied, “I feel like we’re running a baby business.”
For now, the baby and I are the twosome in the family. Because we live in Austria, where maternity leave lasts a year, I am with her all day while my husband is at work. Most days I just enjoy our time together, and I sacrifice my own well-being again and again—picking her up even if my back barely allows me to bend; waking up once more even if I am crippled with exhaustion—to make sure she is okay. I am far more likely to go to sleep and wake with her than with my husband. This saddens me but it feels inevitable. But much to my ignorant shock, even when she begins to sleep through the night or starts daycare, it will never go back to what it was: just my husband and me, the two of us, even in the moments when we are alone.
Modern parents who pride themselves on a “fair” or “balanced” division of labor often say of their spouses, “We’re a good team.” And we are. But it is also hard to deny how much she and I work as a unit, me anticipating her every need before it leads to a meltdown, like a vigilant goalie keeping the soccer ball out of the net. My husband is low-maintenance, so he treats my shift in attention away from him as stark, temporary fact, not intentional wound, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling.
Of course I know that our original twosome will eventually morph into a threesome—experienced parents will tell you that everything changes—but it has surprised me how challenging it is to adjust to family life. I say “family life” because I mean it as distinct from adjusting to motherhood.
I remember saying to the baby in my womb that she was our lovechild, born out of her parents’ adoration for one another. Surely it’s the same for every expectant parent: In my mind we would simply be adding her to our marriage, a piece of each of us to strengthen our bond. But what’s happened is that her presence has reshaped the partnership, making it virtually unrecognizable. We have had to rework almost every pattern—from household tasks to evening rituals to physical affection.
It isn’t at all like adding a piece to the puzzle. Our previous puzzle was complete. Now, we are apprehensively becoming pieces of a new puzzle. We aren’t yet sure which way to turn each shape to make it snap into place—don’t quite know what the whole picture looks like—but we are working, every day, to find out.
Tags: abigail rasminsky, babies, children, family, relationships
“I love her so much but I miss you.” Yes. I think I said this exact thing to my husband when we decided that one child was definitely enough for us. Thank you for sharing this.
As did I. I feel like I said it a hundred times in my daughter’s first year. She’s past her second birthday now, though, and we’re coming back to each other again.
Thank you so much for this.
Thank you. We’re on the precipice of this (I’m pregnant with our first) and it’s terrifying in its irrevocability, even as we’re thrilled. I know everything will change; I just don’t know how right now.
Snap – 24 weeks. Eek! I’m trying to decide whether to give this to my partner to read or whether it’s too scary.
I love the puzzle metaphor. Very apt, and probably better than the “we blew our lives up” metaphor I was prone to use in the first few months!
I was surprised, and I think my husband was too, about how much of the baby care fell (and still falls) to me. I’m not sure if we were naive about the biological realities, or perhaps simply not modern and egalitarian enough, but my husband says he felt like a third wheel in the early days, and I felt like I could never get away. Probably not universal, but it was the sort of alignment and readjustment this piece gets at very well.
At the same time, it’s amazing how you do adjust. Hell, when my daughter was 3 months old or so, we left her with grandparents to go to a wedding. Yep, we were definitely that couple sitting in a corner, scrolling through pictures of our baby on our phones, because we hadn’t seen her for all of 45 minutes. I want another child eventually, and it’s strange to think of our whole family realigning itself yet again.
I totally agree with this. I don’t double for a second that Hamlet can ably take care of our daughter (and he does, relatively frequently now when I travel for work), but in the beginning…man, what with nursing and hormones, and a thousand other things, it felt like it was all me, even if I wasn’t the one who was physically changing all the diapers or whatever.
Someone recently referred to it as the cognitive burden of parenthood – and I’ve noticed that for me, and for many of my friends, even when we’re splitting the time and labor evenly on the outside, it’s the women who have kept all of the details–when did she last poop? what time is that pediatrician appointment? will she eat green beans this week? Where did that scrape come from?–in their heads. And that can be exhausting, and alienating, when it takes up the mental space that used to be allocated to leisure.
I wonder if it gets easier with subsequent kids? Not easier from a “there is more work to do” perspective, but maybe you get a sense of how that change works, and it’s less psychological whiplash to do it again?
That cognitive burden — yes. My son is almost a year old and it seems like I’ve taken on more and more of it, instead of less. To be honest, the first couple months when my husband was home with us I felt unsure and deferred to him on parenting stuff constantly, but since I’ve been on my own it’s been both good and bad. I gained confidence as a mother but I also feel like if my husband were in charge of him for a few days all kinds of things would go wrong, and his medical stuff would never get taken care of it if I didn’t do it. Which is horrifying to me, I thought we were such a modern egalitarian couple, but it turns out when you transition to traditional gender roles it’s hard not to completely fulfill them.
That is a really good observation! I’m sure my husband could shoulder mental load as well, but for a variety of reasons — I’m slightly higher-strung, I work from home so see her more — it’s on me. I’m sure it’s not something anyone means to have happen, but it’s totally unsurprising that it would be more often on the woman.
In my own life, I’m kind of okay with it now that the load is less – a 1-year-old is demanding, but not in the same way as a 1-month-old. There is a rewarding side to being the sun, moon and stars to a tiny creature. But boy was it hard at first.
I worry about that cognitive burden falling too much on my wife, especially now that I’m back at work and she’s on maternity leave and so on full-time baby duty alone. Other than just trying to stay on top of things and handle non-nursing needs (burping, changing, soothing), do you think there are ways for dads to help relieve that burden?
Something I found really helpful was if the Handsome Sidekick could take the baby for just twenty minutes or so, when he got home from work. As much as you’re tired from work, it’s the sheer neediness of that small person and the loneliness of having to deal with it on your own which makes it so difficult to cope when you’re at home. Obviously you can’t be getting up all night with the baby if you have to work, but if you can give her some alone time (if she wants it!) it can be really beneficial.
That’s just me, of course. YMMV, and it sounds like you’re very on the ball and aware of some of the difficulties, so go you 🙂
I think you do get into a rhythm with more children. You take it in your stride more… or perhaps your brain changes so that you compartmentalise the baby-stuff and are still able to then do other things like use actual nouns when you’re talking to people, instead of forgetting your entire vocabulary and calling everything ‘thing’?
It gets easier as they get older and yes, with a second I noticed that my brain worked a bit better.
This was the script; what we were supposed to feel.
From the outside, it looks like a great many of my family and friends who become parents feel constrained by that script, by the fear that if they don’t cleave to it, they’ll be judged harshly.
But the truth for so many of them only makes sense: of course having a child is disruptive, and of course for many new parents it would be helpful to feel free to talk about that — not just in lighthearted jokes about sleep deprivation or tender expressions of new love, but to talk about the alarming way the world turns sideways when your life is altered forever.
Every time a new parent is as honest and eloquent as you are here, they make the world better for people who feel pressure to keep to the script.
About a year before we had our son, a friend whose wife had had a baby a few weeks prior came out to happy hour (for, you know, all of 45 minutes). He was exhausted, as one is. Someone asked how he was feeling about fatherhood, and he said, “you know, it’s not that fulfilling.” Seeing how frank and spent he was, and how not. one. person in the room judged him for a second, actually made me *more* comfortable with the idea of having children. He is now, of course, an excellent father who loves his daughter (and just had a second), but I really appreciatedf the experience of someone just saying “this isn’t great” without the world falling down.
I randomly met a dude with 2 young kids the other day, and we started talking about being new dads and he said, “this first year is awful. Just awful. I hated every day of it” and it was like feeling a cool breeze after wading through a swamp of sentimental bullshit.
Thank you for writing this! You do go through a drastic identity shift when that baby arrives, different even from when you were pregnant – your belly is no longer the focus, it’s The Baby. And when that baby makes your body hurt and tired and your mind goes blank with exhaustion, it’s hard to say anything because you imagine the world of internet commenters is waiting to reply with a quick, “What did you expect when you got pregnant?!?!” So, again, thanks for writing this.
This is incredible. Thank you for writing it. My wife and I are still a few years off from kids, but I’ve started having brief panics that focus on this sort of thing. I want kids (a kid?), I know that much, but I’m so in love with the relationship my wife and I share that I don’t know how I’ll handle a third. I’m a little scared.
This was really great. The puzzle metaphor felt very apt to me. I will say that, after a year, it feels like we’ve created a new puzzle. But I’ll admit that I didn’t even know what SHAPE that puzzle was for at least 6 months, maybe longer.
+1000
I know it’s common to say “thank you for this,” but holy moly, reading this made me feel so much less alone. I am the father of a 2-week old son and am living this right now. I’m still shocked how much I miss my relationship with my wife, or rather the time we had as just the two of us. I miss it so much. I love my son more than I could ever imagine loving anything, but I do sometimes feel a tinge of regret that we didn’t wait a little longer and so have more time together just the two of us. I had no idea I’d feel this way, and *nobody* told me it would happen. I guess seasoned parents grow so used to their new roles that they forget this feeling, which is encouraging, but our pre-baby marriage is still so fresh in my memory that it’s hard not to feel a sense of mourning for it.
So, thank you thank you thank you!
Thanks for this piece. As other commenters have said, this conversation is so important for new parents who don’t identify with the script. For this child free person, it puts me in a new state of awe at how anyone’s marriage survives children. When a friend confessed that she was unprepared for how much her partnership with her husband changed, I had no context in which to support her. Was certainly of the opinion that sleep deprivation and changes are stressful, so… sympathy hug? Since that time, I’ve had more awareness around this, and find that all of my friends grieve in some way that “running a baby factory” means putting their marriage on hold.
Thank You, Thank You.
My kid is five and I still have a LOT of these feelings. It ebbs and flows at this point but yeah. Wow. I can’t remember the last time I read something that truly, truly I could have written. If I were as talented a writer obviously. Chills all over and tears in my eyes…thank you for sharing.
As a childless person who hopes to be so for the rest of her life, I thought this was a beautiful piece about partnership and growing as a person and as a couple. I’m encouraged because it reinforces a lot of the feelings I’ve had about why I don’t want children – I’m not the type to give up what my partner and I have; I’ve never felt the pull to share him with anyone in the way the author describes. And that’s OK! And wanting a child and a change is OK too! As always, a new perspective on the situation is refreshing and wonderful.
I think the sentiments in this article are why having a kid has REALLY reinforced my belief that no one should have kids unless they really, truly want them. I think it speaks well of people’s character when they can know that about themselves and buck all of the (ridiculous, IMHO) social pressure to have kids.
I too am child free by choice and I felt the same way as you reading this article!
Oh lord, me too. I’m certain my world would crumble.
I also thought this was beautiful and it very much reinforces my desire to not have kids, but all I had in me was a shitty “DO NOT WANT” comment.
My first child was the result of an unexpected pregnancy at 19, three months into the relationship with my first, and as happened, only boyfriend. As much pressure as there is to conform to the script for everyone, I think that pressure can increase when you’re having a child in a situation everyone else sees as terrible. Any sign of doubt is seen as proof of the failure everyone is expecting for you. When you stick to the script, people think you’re deluded, but that is somehow better than being the unmarried almost-teen (I was 20 by the time the baby arrived) mom who just can’t handle it, just like everyone expected.
I *did* have the warm fuzzy feelings for the baby from the first, which was nice, but I am still, at 35 and the mother of three, ambivalent about my personal identity as mother. I’m married to that first boyfriend and very happy to be so, but it certainly does not fit the script I’d imagined for my life. I like reading about other people who love their families but have a sort of restless ambivalence about what these disruptions mean. My theory about babies and relationships is that babies are intesifiers, and as much as that can sound like a good, it’s true for small annoyances and rifts as much as it is true for the lovey dovey feelings.
Many good thoughts you-ward. That was some lovely writing about a very true thing.
The taps into feelings I’ve had for ages and yet have never been able to speak about to another human being. So thanks. It’s nice to know that I’m not alone.
“A bomb had fallen in the middle of my marriage; a perfect, wanted bomb, but a bomb nonetheless”
Ya, that pretty much was the line that ran through my mind for a long time but knew I probably shouldn’t say out loud.
I’ve never commented before, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciated this view. My husband and I on that should-we-or-shouldn’t-we precipice with regards to having kids, and while we’ve always agreed that we want kids as part of our larger life arc, it’s hard to imagine how anyone ever decides to go ahead with it and turn their lives upside down. We’re in our early 30s and have been together for a decade, and I’m *still* not sure I’m willing to share this relationship (or my body parts) with anyone else just yet.
Something I found really helpful was if the Handsome Sidekick could take the baby for just twenty minutes or so, when he got home from work. As much as you're tired from work, it's the sheer neediness of that small person and the loneliness of having to deal with it on your own which makes it so difficult to cope when you're at home. Obviously you can't be getting up all night with the baby if you have to work, but if you can give her some alone time (if she wants it!) it can be really beneficial.
That's just me, of course. YMMV, and it sounds like you're very on the ball and aware of some of the difficulties, so go you 🙂
I think you do get into a rhythm with more children. You take it in your stride more… or perhaps your brain changes so that you compartmentalise the baby-stuff and are still able to then do other things like use actual nouns when you're talking to people, instead of forgetting your entire vocabulary and calling everything 'thing'?
I think people like to sugar coat the experience because they don’t want to be seen as whinging about something we all go through, but geez, the whole thing is exhausting and a little crazy, and as much as I did fall in love with my first child almost instantly, I also was not prepared for how intense other emotions would be. Like how much I wanted to throw him out the window when he wouldn’t stop crying. (I didn’t, just in case you’re concerned).
I realised how much it pissed me off when people would brag about their children ‘Oh, my cherubic little sweetheart can roll over/sleeps through the night/is feeding perfectly/is on the 90th percentile for intelligence’ you know, that kind of thing. So I decided not to do it, and it’s such a weight off. No need to keep up to anyone’s standard. Good on you for being open with all this, and it does get better. Mostly 😉
(No, really, it does).
I think people like to sugar coat the experience because they don't want to be seen as whinging about something we all go through, but geez, the whole thing is exhausting and a little crazy, and as much as I did fall in love with my first child almost instantly, I also was not prepared for how intense other emotions would be. Like how much I wanted to throw him out the window when he wouldn't stop crying. (I didn't, just in case you're concerned).
I realised how much it pissed me off when people would brag about their children 'Oh, my cherubic little sweetheart can roll over/sleeps through the night/is feeding perfectly/is on the 90th percentile for intelligence' you know, that kind of thing. So I decided not to do it, and it's such a weight off. No need to keep up to anyone's standard. Good on you for being open with all this, and it does get better. Mostly 😉
(No, really, it does).
You’re right. It’s so hard–I miss my husband too (including physically; at five months post partum and I only just had some healing issues resolve). At the same time, I feel very much like a dyad now–with my daughter. I write my love letters to her now. It’s scary, sometimes, how consuming it is. But then I see him with her and realize he’s feeling the same thing, and that we’re together in that. She’ll grow and individuate and become her own person and roll her eyes at our love for her, but he won’t, because he knows and feels it, too.
You're right. It's so hard–I miss my husband too (including physically; at five months post partum and I only just had some healing issues resolve). At the same time, I feel very much like a dyad now–with my daughter. I write my love letters to her now. It's scary, sometimes, how consuming it is. But then I see him with her and realize he's feeling the same thing, and that we're together in that. She'll grow and individuate and become her own person and roll her eyes at our love for her, but he won't, because he knows and feels it, too.
This TERRIFIES me. I really want to get pregnant soon (I’m 34, we’ve been together for 10 years and married for 3). But this exact scenario* that you describe is something my husband and I are both afraid of.
*Minus the year of maternity leave – this is the US. “Maternity leave?” we say, “Ha! We shall mouth platitudes about the Greatest Love and Family Values and make you go back to work after 6 weeks at half pay IF YOU’RE LUCKY.”
This TERRIFIES me. I really want to get pregnant soon (I'm 34, we've been together for 10 years and married for 3). But this exact scenario* that you describe is something my husband and I are both afraid of.
*Minus the year of maternity leave – this is the US. "Maternity leave?" we say, "Ha! We shall mouth platitudes about the Greatest Love and Family Values and make you go back to work after 6 weeks at half pay IF YOU'RE LUCKY."
My experience with parenthood was so different from yours: I was married to my kid’s dad for ten years before we had kids, for instance. I don’t really identify with it. But I love so much that you wrote this, and that so many people in the comments identify with it. I love that other views of parenting are getting out there in the world so that people can find each other. Great piece.
Agreed! Can’t relate at all but SO glad to see this online. Keep up the good work, The Toast.
OH, yes. I identified so much with this post! It’s such a shock to feel your central relationship shift so drastically away from romance and unity, when it was SO good before. But fwiw, for me and many of my friends (so, this is purely anecdotal evidence, BUT), everything got SO much easier and better after the first two years – suddenly I felt like my husband and I were a real romantic couple with a much-loved child, as well as being a complete family, after two years of feeling like we were just two partners – really, colleagues – in the child-rearing business. We have a second child now who’s less than one year old, but this time round I feel so much less panic and angst about the same shifts happening again in our relationship, because this time, I actually know that it’s temporary, whereas with our first child, I felt miserably convinced that it might be FOREVER.
OH, yes. I identified so much with this post! It's such a shock to feel your central relationship shift so drastically away from romance and unity, when it was SO good before. But fwiw, for me and many of my friends (so, this is purely anecdotal evidence, BUT), everything got SO much easier and better after the first two years – suddenly I felt like my husband and I were a real romantic couple with a much-loved child, as well as being a complete family, after two years of feeling like we were just two partners – really, colleagues – in the child-rearing business. We have a second child now who's less than one year old, but this time round I feel so much less panic and angst about the same shifts happening again in our relationship, because this time, I actually know that it's temporary, whereas with our first child, I felt miserably convinced that it might be FOREVER.
Somehow this struck a chord with me although I’ve never been a parent.
This line was really important to me:
“Our previous puzzle was complete”
Because I feel like often (as a childless woman who ticks the 25-34 age box on forms) I’m spoken to or treated as though I am someone who is waiting for something. I feel as though politicians ignore people like me, or treat me like I’m larvae, and won’t be fully-formed until I either procreate or affirm my decision not to.
Maybe we should all be treated as if we’re whole, whatever our lives are like. And then when change comes, we can deal with loss a bit better (by not glossing over it as linear progression).
That’s my axe I wanted to grind.
Amazing writing tho.
Somehow this struck a chord with me although I've never been a parent.
This line was really important to me:
"Our previous puzzle was complete"
Because I feel like often (as a childless woman who ticks the 25-34 age box on forms) I'm spoken to or treated as though I am someone who is waiting for something. I feel as though politicians ignore people like me, or treat me like I'm larvae, and won't be fully-formed until I either procreate or affirm my decision not to.
Maybe we should all be treated as if we're whole, whatever our lives are like. And then when change comes, we can deal with loss a bit better (by not glossing over it as linear progression).
That's my axe I wanted to grind.
Amazing writing tho.
Your post brought me back to the feelings I had 15 years ago, when I looked at my gorgeous, extremely wanted first child and thought to myself, he is so beautiful, surely there is a wonderful woman out there who would be a better mother to him than I am.
I too was overdue, (11 days), had a long difficult labor that ended in a very dramatic C-section. I had some complications that required me to be left in the recovery room for almost 12 hours, the nurses told my husband to go get some sleep, and my baby was in the nursery. It was not the joyous delivery that I would see on A Baby Story, or dreamed about for years. My body needed to recover, but recovery from major surgery is hard enough when your only job is getting better. Add on the lack of sleep and non-stop nursing and caring for a new baby and I firmly think a new moms feelings for her new role can be effected. I always loved my baby, but it did take a few weeks to fall in love. Which I surely did. Very hard!! And all the joy I expected to feel did arrive, it just took my body and mind a little bit of time to catch up. Thank you for sharing this, it’s not something that is often told to new moms and it is needed. Everyone needs to know they are not alone! Congratulations on your babies first year!!!
Very honest article. Becoming a parent is so discombobulating (especially after a really tough birth which people rarely acknowledge – you're supposed to (and have to, in a way) just move on immediately). We still don't talk openly enough about these transitions. I went through it too, and with my kids now school-age I also can reassure you as many others have that the adjustment will eventually be made, the feelings of strangeness and loss will pass, and, all going well, you will reconnect with your husband in new ways. I do think making an effort to keep a separate focus on your relationship with your partner (easier once your baby gets older and more independent) is vital though – for your yourselves, and for your baby to grow up knowing her parents care deeply for one another as well as for her. I don't think the sense of security that gives a child can be underestimated. Also, one thing that's hard to understand when your child is a baby is how they eventually turn into an actual person who takes their place within your family. You of course know it intellectually, but it's hard to imagine nonetheless. Then you start worrying about how you will ever let them go and go back to just being a twosome 🙂 Good luck and enjoy!!
I have read so many articles on new parenthood and none of them have ever really captured what I was feeling, so I thought it was just me–until I read this. This is perfect. Thank you so much.