When you first become a parent, there’re so many things to agonise over.
I’m such a worrier; I barely knew where to begin. The endless lists from the hospital about all the essentials your baby will need, rather then spurring me into action and getting organised, in fact only served to compound my terror.
After the baby had come, as the weeks past and I fretted endlessly over tiny things, I noticed something funny happening. For the most part, whatever particular idiosyncrasy of the baby that was worrying me one week would usually by the next have been largely resolved by itself. This seems true of so many of the things I fixated on. It’s mad that the things that seemed so HUGE at the time eventually become such distant memories that you can hardly recall what they were until a fretting (new mother) friend rings you panicked because the baby hasn’t pooed in eight days.
10 things I WASTED my time worrying about when I became a mum:
1. Worrying that he was sleeping too much
I thought this because for the first few days in the hospital he slept almost continuously, even through the chorus of the four other babies in the room crying. This is not information you want to bandy about in front of other new mothers who may lash out at you for gloating about your baby who sleeps. Suffice it to say this did NOT last long.
2. Forever wondering if I should wake the baby for a feed
Foolish, foolish girl, little did I realise that give it a day or two and he would be latched on to me around the clock and never sleep again.
3. He won’t keep the little mittens on
Has any baby since the dawn of baby mittens actually kept the baby mittens on?
4. Wind
The first minutes, hours, days, weeks and MONTHS of new parenthood are consumed by anxiety about wind. Does he have wind? Was that a wind just there? Or just a creaky floorboard? He’s fallen asleep but he hasn’t got his wind up? Will I leave him to sleep? But what if he gets a pain and that wakes him up? Will I wind him and risk waking him up? Then one day you sit a slightly roundier, more robust baby up in your arms and he just burps by himself. Halle-fuckin’-lujah.
5. Sleeping
There is so much energy squandered pouring over the sleep patterns of babies. It’s all so futile. If there were one thing I could go back in time and tell my stressed out, wild-eyed, sleep cycle-analysing, nap time-obsessed, new mother self it would be this:
“Don’t f*cking bother, 18 months from now he STILL won’t be sleeping! Just stop wasting what little strength you have left worrying about it.”
I’d say it in a cheerful voice and deliver the news with a big glass of wine to soften the blow, of course.
6. Baby weight (his, not mine)
The babies are weighed pretty frequently in the first six months and there is a lot of emphasis on average growth ranges. To this I would now like to say to the PHN who analysed his stats: “Of course he’s not in the average percentile. How dare you! No baby of mine is average. He’s EXCEPTIONAL!” At the time, I was a bit fretty as he was small when he was born and seemed to be hungry ALL THE TIME. Cut to a year later and he’s about the size of a five-year-old. There was no need to worry.
7. Tummy time
There is a LOT of emphasis put on tummy time in the early months. I had kind of forgotten this until a friend asked me how I had gotten The Child to do tummy time as her daughter hated it. “They all seem to hate it,” I said to reassure her. I remember being bizarrely obsessed with giving The Child the recommended amount of tummy time. He would just lie there crying into his mat. “He doesn’t seem to like that,” said The Man. We abandoned tummy time. And nothing dire happened.
8. The constipation
Once the baby went six days without pooing. We did EVERYTHING. Including that awful thing with the cotton bud and the vaseline. With every passing day that he didn’t do a shit, I was rapidly losing mine. The day that the constipation finally ended I walked into the mother-in-law’s house and announced proudly “He did a poo!”. Out of context, it probably sounded somewhat idiotic, she didn’t realise that this was the most hotly anticipated shit of our lives.
9. Biting
His biting phase lasted for about three weeks but for those three weeks I was like a woman possessed. Was this a sign of some deeper behavioural problem? Where had I gone wrong? Had some other child bitten him? Is that where he got it? Should I get a tetanus shot? Should I bite him back? Ludicrous stuff. About a week later I moved on to worrying about willy pulling and forgot all about the biting until a friend mentioned that her one was at it.
10. Won’t eat solid food
Again I was virtually convinced that he would be going to secondary school still on five bottles a day. “Maybe he won’t ever be an eater.” I wailed to anyone who would put up with my insane ramblings. Clearly this is not the case now.
