That’s OK

or
Some words about parenthood, three months in.

By and large social media is a highlights reel or a trailer for how your life is. And we all know that we can be duped into seeing a crappy film by a fancy trailer that edits out the shit bits. By extension, we must also all know, surely, that the person most conspicuously having an easy time of it also has days when they get shat or vomited on or screamed at or woken six times in a night by a baby who just wants to sit on their boob and not actually eat, or days when they feel absolutely isolated and incapable and alone. And that’s OK.

To put it more simply, “There are days when I eat a whole pack of Oreos and cry at you when you get home,” said Emma. And to be fair they’re pretty few and far between – which is great – but they do happen and we should acknowledge that.

We’ve been very lucky – Nora is a pretty smiley, contented, happy baby, and she came into the world, from conception through pregnancy to birth, with relative ease – but she’s also clingy, and sometimes decides that sleep is for wimps, and she’s alert, which means she doesn’t want to be left alone, and she’s also a baby, and babies are gross and disgusting and full of congealed milk and yellow shit which quite often leaks out of both ends at once. And that’s OK.

“I think it’s about how you perceive it. Some people might be going through the same things that we are right now and really struggle. And I’m really trying, which isn’t like me [except it is, Nick], to just accept this and be lead by her.”

We both spend a lot of time trying to put ourselves in Nora’s shoes, as it were; what is she thinking and perceiving right now, how is she feeling, what does this mean to her? And this is incredibly difficult because Nora, three months ago, started from a base of absolutely nothing; no physiological, emotional, or intellectual experience at all. As smiley as Nora is a lot of the time, the entire world is still entirely new to her, and that means it is baffling, and terrifying, and confusing sometimes. And brilliant at others. But when she wakes from an afternoon nap and immediately screams as if she’s terrified, and nothing but loud Aphex Twin and bouncing will calm her, that’s OK, because she’s a baby and the entire world is entirely new to her, and wouldn’t you scream, too?

There are no magic bullets here. If there was ‘one weird old trick’ to getting your baby to sleep / eat / stop crying / lose weight / gain weight / walk / sit up / beg / roll over [delete as appropriate] then the entire world would all be doing it and there’d be no enormous industry selling books (or websites, or apps, or whatever) of advice to paranoid new parents. But every baby is different, and every parent is too, and that’s OK.

This post is pretty unfocused and rambling, and the paragraphs don’t necessarily follow on logically from each other, and that’s OK too; it’s not easy to concentrate on anything for long when the baby monitor might explode. I’ve barely written anything in months – even before Nora arrived – but I’ve had it relatively easy. I’m sleeping in the spare room (so I am actually sleeping, almost as much as I used to), and I still manage a bike ride most weekends, and I’ve had record club a handful of times. But Emma’s life has been turned upside-down as mine’s just been tilted.

“I can’t believe we talked about getting her adopted, and we really meant it [we did!]; looking back she wasn’t ever that difficult.” She wasn’t (mostly still isn’t) a crier, and she slept relatively well early on (even if that’s not the case right now), but in those first few weeks you simply don’t know what the hell is going on or how to deal with it or who/what your baby is, and it does feel like a massive, idiotic mistake, and like you should have bought a house with one less bedroom and a bigger garden and wouldn’t a dog be easier?

“I guess feeding was an obvious issue; she always fed well, but… I was in fucking agony.” We had to get Nora’s tongue-tie cut twice, and she still sometimes causes Emma a lot of pain through latching lazily or coming on and off the boob absent-mindedly (absent-mindedly? She’s a baby!).

Before Nora arrived I kind of expected – and this is ludicrous, but it’s the way culture teaches us, through both religion and science (evolution) to think about ‘progress’ – that there’d be a kind of linear upwards curve in her development and sleep an so on; that is, that she’d get a little bit better every day. But that’s nonsense, and if there is a graph to be plotted then it’s a jagged mountain range of a line, which, yes, is ascending, but with crazy, almost unpredictable troughs caused by developmental surges and growth spurts and “the 4-month sleep regression” (how terrifying does that sound?). And that’s the same for everything. Evolution took millions of years to get from amoebas to ragdoll cats, and, you know, there were dinosaurs and dodos and duck-billed platypuses and all sorts of other miss-steps and oddness en route. Why should babies be any smoother? And that’s OK.

“I know you said [this post] is disjointed but to me it feels really disjointed.” And that’s OK, because I think that’s kind of my point, and the medium is the message, or something. Em’s read plenty of stuff – blogs, books, forums, etc etc – about parenting, because she just naturally does research things without thinking, but we’ve both tried not to read too much stuff (I’ve been very successful at this, as usual), because we want to just kind of work off instinct as much as we can. “Sometimes I let this stuff [points at phrase ‘blogs, books, forums, etc etc’] cloud my judgement, but I’m trying not to. I’m trying to just go with it. Not worry about routines and sleeping through the night and all the things that books and other people put pressure on you to do.” And that’s OK.