Six Months Postpartum And...
Six things I've learned in six months as your mom
Little girl, you turned six-months old over the weekend. And yes, the next words I’m writing are the obvious ones: time flies. Like any mortal mother, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of early parenthood, succumbing to the inevitable postpartum temporal fugue only to wake up in a foreign sort of Wonderland, where you’re sitting up on your own and mashing banana all over your face.
I’m in sheer disbelief that my tiny little bean has sprouted into such a leggy budling.
It feels like just yesterday that a slow Autumn Sunday ushered you into the world with its soft simplicity and glowing warm yellow leaves, rippling in a gentle breeze. A Fall dripping with the overflowing juices from a hot and sunny Summer. Tomatoes and babies ripening on the vine, plucked right at their blistering point.
And yet, the budding magnolias, frozen with the last recent April snowfall, signal that we’ve made it through the longest, coldest, and snowiest winter of your early babyhood, all the way to here: an uncertain spring teetering on the brink of warmth, regeneration, and a great pollening. I can’t help but find parallels in these seasonal transitions, as you make more confident attempts to sit on your own or push yourself up from your tummy into an army crawl.
My sweet baby girl, you have shown me so much over this half-year. I love learning about who you are at your core. I love watching you discover and encounter, sense and feel. Your intuition is a beauty to behold. Your cunning crinkly eyes show me just how much you already know. Your cheeky smile fuels a boisterous giggle in us both. You are joy personified.
And while I’d love to spend the next thousand words (and the next thousand lifetimes) holding your sweet baby gaze in text, I must stop here. For your personhood is not meant to be devoured by the public. So with that, dear internet, let’s move briskly onto the motherhood of it all. Come, quick!
The first six months of new parenthood are impossible to adequately describe. And yet, we make attempts.
They’re fresh and bubbling with the joy of new life, stretching and yawning and doing its diligent tummy time.
They’re cruel and crushing, with the unrelenting sleep pressure, weighing heavily on a pair of parents that can’t seem to hack their way out of basic human biology.
They’re frozen in place, with endless days bridging long and lonely nights; lonely despite there being another human around all the time.
The months march forward, marking their progress in milliliters, then ounces, ounces, then pounds.
Its easy to see the changes in our babies over time, written on their faces, measured with scales and tape measurers and AAP questionnaires. Such a map and key do not exist for for parents, despite a near universal parental sense that a great internal transformation is occurring within ourselves, too. So, today, I mark the parenting lessons and milestones unlocked…for good measure.
Lesson 1: Take the Feeding Path of Least Resistance.
I’ve written a couple of pieces on my experiences breastfeeding our first son and now our daughter.
With our first, we combo fed and relied heavily on formula.
Powder, bottles, pump parts, soap. It was an experience filled with supplies and receipts.
Our younger baby is exclusively on the boob.
Flesh, scratching nails, razor sharp gums, impatience, wet bras. Its an experience that’s fundamentally changed me as a human. I have an entirely different relationship with my body, my daughter, nutrition, sleep, and time, to name a few.
Two very different, but equally valid experiences, each filled with their own trials and trade-offs. No matter what feeding arrangement you conceptually plan for, I encourage every new parent in my life to find peace in taking stock of what works IRL and then taking the path of least resistance. Your baby or your body will likely be the one(s) to dictate what that path is.
Lesson 2: Ask for Help. Accept Help.
One day, about 3.5 months post-partum, the sky above me suddenly ripped apart, the weight of the universe and all its stars came raining down on my head. I had become sleep deprived enough, that a crack had formed in my psyche, just wide enough for a crushing (and quite temporary) hormonal anxiety to seep through. What I really wanted in that moment was a day alone and a good nap. That desire to retreat and hide felt completely contradictory to inviting anyone into my home to witness my struggle.
But, that’s what I had to muster up the courage to do.
Despite all of the discourse online around “the village” — the debate about whether the village has died, whether we even want the village, and how we have to be the village for other people, the fact remains: postpartum is hard and lonely. There are times when you will need help as a new mom and you will (if you’re like me) not want to ask for it.
Asking my mother-in-law to come over and help for a full day of baby and toddler care was the best thing I could have done to help myself in that situation. Her help did not make my pain or anxiety go away. The “village” can offer logistical and tactical support, but is not a magic cure for the internal postpartum strife we experience.
It was still my job to sweep up the fallen stars strewn across the corners of my linoleum kitchen floor and flick them one by one back up into space.
Ask for help. Accept the help that’s offered.
Lesson 3: Set Your Baby Down.
When people ask me about my experience parenting two (significantly) under two, I usually something to the effect of “our hearts and hands are very full.” And that’s the truth. What we avoided in emotional toddler jealousy over the new baby, we made up for in an ongoing tactical struggle with manpower insufficiency.
We learned pretty quickly to focus our moment-to-moment attention on the kid in imminent physical danger (typically, big bro) and to put the baby down. On the floor.
At first, laying our girl down on a random floor blanket felt sad and lonely. But, now, I look at our daughter’s ability to play independently, her appreciation of tummy time, and overall interest in gross motor “stuff,” as evidence that this practice was not just convenient, but inherently good for her.
Lesson 4: Be Compassionate and Disciplined with Sleep.
All babies humans sleep differently. On different timelines. For different amounts of time. At different intervals.
Despite what various expensive baby gear manufacturers and sleep gurus might try to sell you, there is no way to hack your way out of basic biology.
Instead, what we’ve learned in getting two little babies to sleep through the night, is a couple of baseline rules to shepherd our kids through their own sleep journeys with equal parts compassion and diligence:
Don’t force sleep systems that don’t work. My daughter exclusively contact napped, mostly on me, for 21 weeks. And for anyone that thinks having a baby sleep on you 4x per day for 5 months is pure bliss, let me level with you and say that its *also* grueling and exhausting. [See: not getting to nap yourself, not getting any chores done, having to pee!!!] For us, the contact naps were the only and best way to get good naps, and good naps = good nighttime sleep.
Make sure you know a sleep system doesn’t work before you give up. Instead of always taking the route I knew worked and contact napping, I continuously “checked” that crib naps weren’t working for my girl. She took at least a short nap in her crib almost every day. One day, the crib naps started working.
Remember that your sleep systems will evolve over time. Sense when transition is needed. Our daughter spent about 5 months sleeping in a bedside bassinet. In the last few weeks of this arrangement, it became clear that my husband and I were waking her up when we would come to bed. It was time for her own room.
Lesson 5: Lighten Up.
My husband and I heeded the ample warnings that, since we had an “easy” first baby, our second would likely be a challenge. We geared up for a colicky screamer and were greeted instead by a baby that was even “easier” than our first. Lucky us.
Still, I think that lesson in adaptability that other parents shared with us was a good one.
I want to expand on the idea of dropping expectations here and say this:
Its well documented that our systems and culture have created a set of unattainable and competing expectations for being a good parent. We are met in return with crumbling or non-existent familial support structures. Not only are the standards high and the support resources low, the “rules” are ever-changing. The mental load is heavy and it feels particularly important to get every aspect of parenting “right,” in the early days of babyhood, when the stakes are sky high. In parenting our second baby, I’ve learned that its actually these external expectations of what it looks like to be a good mom that we need to expel.
I don’t have a fix for this system we are in, although I do recommend the book Bringing up Bebe for a more global and longitudinal perspective on parenting.
When you inevitably feel bogged down by the weight of mothering a small human, I recommend getting really effing goofy. Playing an aggressive game of chase with my toddler, bringing the basketball hoop outside, going on a cold nature walk and pointing out all the dogs - these are some tactics that work to help me reconnect and remember that being their mom is the most natural thing in the world.
You don’t need a manual.
Lesson 6: Don’t Stop Striving.
In my early postpartum days with baby girl, the aforementioned contact napping left my hands busy and my brain idle. During contact naps I’d toggle between LinkedIn and Substack, contemplating how I wanted to shape the next phases of my career and motherhood.
This one is for the Substack moms.
I love what we are building here. I love what you are writing about. During a phase when we are consistently and literally being sucked dry by our wonderful young humans, this platform offers the opportunity to build something entirely of our own. I love reading your stories of ferocity, passion, and self-discovery. I love peeking into your worlds and plans and aspirations.
I love when you’re relatable and I love when you are honest and raw.
Please don’t ever stop.
—LJ
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It feels like yesterday I was singing a lullaby to my newborn daughter and tonight she is a jumping 15 month old that sings the lullaby with me in her own baby language.
While parenting an infant, time indeed flies at the speed of light!