It’s a Girl

When you are pregnant with your first child, people ask lots of questions about morning sickness and birth plans, and make cracks about how you’ll never sleep again once the baby arrives.

You might conclude that pregnancy is arduous, labor and delivery are hell, and babies are cute but you won’t notice because you’ll be far too sleep-deprived.

Well, yes and no. Pregnancy for me had its minor discomforts, but that was all they were. Labor and delivery didn’t exactly happen, given Delphine’s super-breechitude and our scheduled C-section.

And the sleep thing? Well, as a friend commented over a year ago, about her then six-month-old son, “If you had told me last year that I wouldn’t get more than six or seven hours of sleep a night for months and months, I would’ve thought I couldn’t handle it. But you know what? You get used to it.”

At our house, the every-two-hours nursing routine of the first few months quickly slid into a once-a-night snack, and eventually into a nothing-a-night routine. Yes, it’s true: Delphine goes to bed around 7 or 8, and then sleeps until 7 or 8 the next morning. Twelve hours with nary a peep.

So we’ve taken care of pregnancy, labor, and sleep. Here are the other major things nobody thinks to tell you about before the baby shows up.

1) Breastfeeding can be not only difficult but agonizing. One new mom I know, who delivered her baby the old-fashioned way, told me recently that the pain of learning to breastfeed vastly exceeded that of labor and delivery. Ugh.

And guess what? Once your kiddo pops out a few teeth, breastfeeding becomes unfun all over again. Here again the books will fail you; their advice about biting is always to firmly tell your child “No!” and then somehow, magically, your genius offspring will realize that your yelling is connected to her biting (and the occasional stretching of the nipple like chewing gum) and will politely stop doing it. Ha.

2) Your kid will physically beat you up from day one — flailing, kicking, scratching, biting, head-butting. Even when you know your tot isn’t malevolently trying to inflict suffering, it still hurts. And for us, um, older parents, trying to play with a baby down on the floor or pick up 25 pounds of chubby tot ain’t exactly easy on the creaky joints.

3) Your kid will psychologically beat you up from day one — usually when she’s sobbing her little heart out. You can’t make your kid happy all the time, of course. Sometimes this is annoying and frustrating (and makes you feel guilty for being such an unfeeling parent), while at other times it simply breaks your own heart. Delphine crying for an hour because she has a nasty head cold and can’t keep down baby Tylenol? Mommy and daddy are miserable, too.

As Sandra Tsing Loh writes in Mother on Fire, “Motherhood itself is Promethean — well, let’s call her ‘Mrs. Prometheus.’ Which is to say, yes, you bring fire to humanity, but you also end up being chained to a rock and having your liver pecked out over and over again, every day, with ever-fresh, dive-bombing black crows of Worry.”

4) Your day will shift from adult-sized chunks of time to baby-sized nuggets of time. Think 10 minutes instead of half an hour or an hour. Dangle a toy in front of baby, hop up to change laundry, read baby a book, put water on for tea, change baby’s diaper, realize baby needs a bath, run water for bath, put baby in bath, forget that water for tea is on stove until water boils, drag dripping baby from bathtub to kitchen to turn off kettle . . . and so it goes, in little bits of activity until, goodness, it’s midnight! Fine for baby, not so fine for adults who need, say, at least 20 uninterrupted minutes to take a shower or make dinner.

The worst part of the day? The sloooow hours between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., when everybody is tired, hungry, and grouchy, but stuff still has to get done: dinner, dishes, bathing, bedtime. Not for nothing did my mom dub this period “the gangrene hour.”

5) New babies have an unerring ability to get hungry, tired, or cross right when the parents are trying to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Said parents are then stuck doing one of the following: shoveling food into their faces while the baby screams, eating cold food later, or doing a little of both. A leisured, civilized meal in peace and quiet? Hire a babysitter, or eat when the kiddo is sacked out for the night.

Fortunately, as Delphine is now old enough to sit in a high chair and eat three meals of solid food a day, accompanied by noisy plastic toys, these days we plop her in her high chair to join us. And guess what? She’s at the big table, with the big folks, and is instantly happy.

6) OK, this is an extra one, but fellow new mom Kathleen has written about the depressing insta-aging that she experienced after her son was born last year. Gray hair I knew about, sure. But I might not have known about the hair-falling-out-at-four-months-postpartum thing if my hairdresser hadn’t warned me about it beforehand.

Yes, it’s true: Your old life is over. And yes, the new one is tough. But you know what? That old life quickly seems like it belonged to someone else entirely. Not you, parent. You’ve got a new life of your own now.