This is my dispatch from parental leave, an update from my first essay about my parenting fears. In case you were wondering, here’s how it’s going.
Childless Me spent a lot of time ignoring motherhood content. Essays, books, TV shows, movies, Instagram accounts…it simply didn’t exist to me.
I reckon that this is in part because I was approaching 40 and avoiding the question of whether I wanted to (or even could) have a child.
But also, I feared that all those books, TV shows, whatever, would be dull. It felt like it had all been said before: Motherhood is hard, sleep is scarce, husbands be lazy, you’ll poop on the delivery table, your breasts will leak, lol, amiright, the days are long and the years are short, rum te tum, tra la la.
Okay, so. First off, this was unfair. There most definitely is great writing out there about motherhood. (This excerpt from my NPR colleague Mary Louise Kelly’s new book, for example, has caused me to cry during multiple read-throughs.)
But. Childless Me did have a point…which is to say, it’s phenomenally hard to write anything new or original about parenting – something that billions upon zillions of people have done before me.
New-motherhood, it turns out, is at the odd intersection of the mundane and the cataclysmic – everyone has done it, yes, but my God, it tornadoes through your life. It barrels in and leaves you breathless at how quickly it can destabilize your very sense of self. And no matter how smart or thoughtful you are, there is no way to really prepare.
Already this feels cliched. Do you see what Childless Me was getting at? “Nothing can prepare you.” “Motherhood changes everything.” “It leaves you breathless.” Tra la la, rum te tum.
One of the most striking aspects of parenthood for me so far (that is, in my first four-ish months) is just how much it turns out that cliches are true.
Do I have something original to say? I don’t know. But helpful (if cliche-ridden)? I think I could swing that.
Let me restart.
—
I stopped watching the latest season of Yellowjackets halfway through. Not because some of it was just too creepy for me when bedtime came (but it was). Not because the second season drastically fell off in quality (which it did).
No, I stopped watching because it got too real.
This season, one of the characters – a teenaged Shauna – gives birth out in the remote woods, after which there are agonizing scenes of her struggling to breastfeed her baby.
Shauna pleads and cries as this child who so desperately wants food refuses to take food. “Please just eat,” she sobs, forcing her baby’s head toward her breast.
I fidgeted and recoiled and curled my knees to my chest and told my husband to please turn it off. Just four months ago, I was Shauna – hunched over my newborn, begging him to latch, wondering if I was missing some New Mom Knowledge that all the other moms had.
I marveled: how is something that’s so natural so hard? How has the human race even survived? I imagined a filthy cavewoman letting down her animal skin top, hunching over her newborn and crying and cajoling in her prehistoric language.
I spent a lot of time asking my friends, family, therapist some version of this question: How did I not know how hard any of this would be? Did you tell me and I wasn’t listening? Were you afraid of scaring me?
One friend responded, “Ok, but … would you really have wanted to know?”
I’ve thought a lot, and my honest answer is: yes.
And so here are all the things that I wish I had known going in. If you are considering birthing a baby, consider this my (lengthy) advice to you:
Breastfeeding is really, really, really hard.
Early in my pregnancy, I had this fuzzy knowledge that breastfeeding could be difficult. I dimly remembered a passage in Bossypants where Tina Fey wrote about being deeply depressed that she couldn’t breastfeed her child.
At the time, I just thought that, okay, something makes it hard for some women to breastfeed. It must be rare, though — just an unfortunate fluke that happens because…why? I had heard of “clogged milk ducts,” whatever that was…
I wish I had known that most birthing parents have a hard time with breastfeeding – according to one NIH study, 70% of women have some form of breastfeeding problem.
In my short time as a parent, I have heard women tell of the following breastfeeding problems:
Undersupply
Oversupply
Flat nipples
Inverted nipples
Infected nipples
Cracked nipples
Baby physically can’t latch
Baby just refuses to latch
These little blisters called “blebs”
Pain at every feeding
Pain between feedings
This condition called dysphoric milk ejection reflex, where you feel a profound suck-the-color-out-of-your-life depression every single time you feed or pump
In all my pre-birth reading, I failed to grasp how common these problems were…and I certainly never ran across anything about dysphoric milk ejection reflex.
And so I am hereby starting a conspiracy theory right here and now that there is an international illuminati-like coalition tasked with keeping the human race alive that is suppressing this information. I mean, had I known that this condition even existed, Childless Me would probably, yes, have thought twice about not only the benefits of breastfeeding, but also about keeping my ovaries.
Lactation consultants are awesome.
Childless Me assumed lactation consultants were a great big racket. Cut to: me (slash my insurance company) shelling out hundreds of dollars to a deeply kind woman named Isabela in the hopes that she could help me produce enough milk. Isabela made house calls to come watch my baby latch, to weigh my son before and after each feeding, to give me every pointer on increasing supply that she could conjure.
Isabela helped somewhat … and then a few weeks later had to concede what I suspected from the start: that my body would never make even close to enough milk. Not even enough for a full feeding.
She seemed genuinely sad. She talked me through my tears and reassured me when I needed it most: yes, I had tried everything. Yes, I was doing my best. Yes, I was still a good mom.
So. I now come back to my question: why was I not told about any of this?
The thing is, a few people were giving me hints. I’m thinking here of one colleague who told me, unbidden, multiple times before I gave birth, “there’s no shame in quitting breastfeeding. Quitting was great for me.”
I brushed this off. It’s not even that I considered and then discarded her advice; her words just rolled off of me. I don’t quit things, I thought. Ergo, this all simply didn’t apply to me.
She could have been more direct, I guess. But then, there are limits in polite society. She couldn’t very well grab me by the lapels and shake me.
And so this is me reaching through the internet and shaking you – there is a good chance you’ll have problems breastfeeding. And it will have nothing to do with whether you’re doing something wrong. It really won’t.
A lot of the militancy around breastfeeding is gone now.
For what it’s worth, we switched to formula-only feeding at just over two months, and I have yet to talk to a pediatrician, nurse, therapist, or even lactation consultant who has been anything but supportive about that choice.
It is, of course, true that the haters are still out there.
But seriously, you can tell them to cram it. (Also, since quitting breastfeeding, my life is grand.)
Speaking of haters…you have to ignore them.
I learned this quickly. The first thing I remember being told after my c-section – lying there on the operating table, crying and holding my husband’s hand – came from a doctor leaning over the partition and saying sternly, “Your baby is having trouble breathing. He was exposed to sertraline in the womb.”
For those who don’t know: Sertraline is Zoloft. So one of the first things I learned upon giving birth, while the hole in my abdomen was still open, was that apparently, the drugs I selfishly took to fight my depression while pregnant had put my son into the NICU.
For the next few days, I erupted in tears roughly hourly, begging my husband to tell me again and again that I had done the right thing in treating my depression while pregnant. When I visited my son in the NICU, seeing the thread-thin tubes going into his mouth, his lungs, I could barely breathe myself.
My husband, saint that he is, quietly consulted with other NICU doctors and nurses, all of whom told him the same thing: that staying on the Zoloft was fine, that my baby’s breathing problems were common and not a huge deal, and also that lots of things – including the simple fact of having a c-section – can cause breathing issues, and that there is no way to know what triggered it.
So the OR doctor? She was at best maybe somewhat partially right, at worst wrong and also awful to boot.
She could cram it.
Did I tell this all in part to vent about the doctor who is now on my lifelong rage-vengeance list? Yes.
But also: 1) Your mental health is important. Seriously. 2) Whether it’s a horrible doctor or just some lady at the grocery store last week criticizing you for walking to get groceries with your child in the rain (I mean hypothetically), not all criticism of your mothering choices is valid. Actually, a lot of it isn’t.
Use the New Parents subreddit.
For real – it’s for the most part just a bunch of people supporting each other. About once a week there’s a post from some poor parent of a three-week-old saying, “I just can’t do this. I can’t. What do I do now?” and what follows is a thread of encouragement and affirmation that doesn’t seem like it should even exist on the internet in The Year Of Our Lord 2023. It’s one of the most genuinely lovely places online.
Parental leave is not a break.
I recognize that I am wildly, wildly privileged to get as much leave as I do (shoutout to the NPR SAG-AFTRA union).
And of course, don’t get me wrong; leave is a glorious break from thinking about the stuff you have to think about at your job [cough2024presidentialracecough].
But also…it’s still work. This tiny person with no motor skills or emotional control is dictating your life. You know that gif from Captain Phillips, where the pirate is telling Tom Hanks, “LOOK AT ME. I AM THE CAPTAIN NOW.”? That’s your life. Baby is the captain now.
Your body image stuff will be magnified by a hundred times.
Or maybe this is just me. I personally was deeply insecure about my looks during pregnancy. For the most part, I stopped looking in mirrors. I definitely shied away from photos.
As of right now, many of my old clothes still don’t fit. And besides being inconvenient…okay, look. It’s not the world’s biggest tragedy, I know, but I am having a rough time with it. I don’t know how else to put it.
I don’t have great advice about how to deal with this, I guess.
However, I do have a directive: if you are currently pregnant or plan on being so: take photos of your pregnant self. Even if no one will ever see them but you. Document it. Regardless of how you feel – like a sci fi creature, like Gaia spewing life into the world, like normal-you with a strange new frontal appendage – you’ll want a record. Not taking more pregnancy photos is one of my biggest regrets.
Yes, you will change.
I was deeply worried about motherhood — that it would usurp all my individuality, that I would wake up one morning with the Mom Haircut and a Spotify full of Kidz Bop and a total inability to dance.
It hasn’t happened (yet) (also I never could dance), but…I wasn’t crazy. At least for those first few months, especially if you are the birthing parent and especially especially if you choose to breastfeed, you will certainly not have the energy for hobbies or the stuff that made you feel like an individual. Again: Baby is the captain now.
And if you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship, it will sometimes feel like the world WANTS you to primarily be A Mom (TM). You will simply be asked more often than your partner about the baby. You will be asked if you are going back to work part-time, far more often than your husband is.
It’s maddening and it will make you second-guess yourself if, like me, this option never once occurred to you, and you will wonder if maybe you should have considered going back part-time, even if you don’t want to/can’t afford to.
(To be clear, more power to anyone who chooses any work arrangement. Do your thing, everyone.)
At any rate, the jury’s still out on how lasting this all is. I haven’t even gone back to work yet. Check in with me in a few months.
Your partner – or whoever might help you raise this child — is so important to your happiness.
Yes, okay, Lean In is out of vogue and Problematic, but Ms. Sandberg was right about at least one thing: Get an equal partner.
I do have breaks now where I get to think about other things than feeding or napping, and that’s because my husband and I have implemented whole systems – for chores, for cooking, for workouts, for bedtimes, for waking up.
When he has volunteer work, I hang with the kid. When I go for a run, my husband wakes up with him. And so it will go the next time Husband wants to play board games with the boys or when I decide to go get a new tattoo.
That said, I refuse to wholly dismiss my concerns about losing myself. I’m an aging woman and a new mom, so I know I’ll easily stop Mattering to our society any day here. Maybe I’ve started that slide already. And so I guess the best course is to be relentless about still doing Me Things.
(A recommendation on this front: Fair Play — both the book and the card deck. Improved my early-momming life dramatically.)
The first weeks might be the worst you will ever feel in your life.
I have run more than a dozen marathons and one fifty-miler. I have detasseled corn for weeks in 90-degree heat. I have slogged through years’ worth of jobs I detested. I have zombie-shuffled through months-long depressions.
None of them compare to the first weeks of motherhood.
Those first two weeks of hormonal turbulence are a period commonly called the “baby blues.”
And let me say right now: What a fucking stupid name.
Cute and trite and alliterative. It sounds almost bouncy.
And honestly, especially given my history with depression, I figured the baby blues would be nothing in comparison. Maybe I would have some irrational fears that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I’d worry more than usual about the broken world that I brought this perfect creature into blah blah. And so I would shed some quiet, demure tears as I gazed adoringly at my little guy.
But those first weeks were not cute. They were not demure.
It felt like my brain was on fire. My skin tingled with unease. It was a panicked hopelessness, all day, every day.
If the depression gremlin were on PCP, that was my baby blues. If the most profound, can’t-move sadness you’ve ever felt could also be frenzied…that was my baby blues.
And compounding it, the baby blues make no logical sense. You have this new little creature you love so intensely. New love and cuddles and those sweet little chirps don’t feel like they should make you feel this bad.
But they can. So, next piece of advice:
Prepare for a potential emotional shitstorm.
Yes, yes, nothing can truly prepare you for momhood. But you can at least get some basic logistics done ahead of time, especially if you’re prone to depression/anxiety already. Consider it the emotional form of nailing plywood over the windows when a hurricane is approaching.
First off, know where to find a mental health professional before you give birth. Ask your friends and ob-gyn for referrals. Find new-mom support groups.
Have a list of supportive people you can call. And I mean people you can call at any time – like when it’s 2 AM and you think you’re going to die of overwhelm, people who can just sit with you on the line, even when they can’t fix it.
And no, your partner doesn’t count. Your partner is also Going Through It, and the helpless, I-am-trying-my-best look on their face while you lose your mind will further break your heart.
Now, to be clear, the people you call may not be the best at providing comfort. Here is a rough transcript of a conversation I had that first week, with one of the more matter-of-fact women in my life:
ME: [whispering between sobs] I’m so sad and I’m so scared.
HER: Ok, I’m glad you called me. What are you scared about?
ME: I’m afraid I’ll never have fun again and I’m afraid my marriage is going to be totally fucked by this.
HER: [pause] OK, that’s … [another pause] valid.
Weirdly, though, that bit of bracing truth helped a little. It told me, “No, you’re not crazy. This shit is hard.”
So. You’re not crazy. This shit is hard. Prepare for it.
If all of this scares you, I get it. I do. And so I should add:
On the other hand, it could all be fine.
For a lot of people who give birth, there is no emotional turmoil – no epic baby blues, no postpartum depression. Plenty of people are fine. I personally just wasn’t, and I know a lot of other people weren’t, either. It’s good to talk about this stuff.
Furthermore, it gets way better, and pretty quickly. I’ve been told that a second baby is so much less harrowing simply because you know that it won’t last forever. In my first couple weeks, I begged other women to reassure me of this — that my child wouldn’t forever be a screaming newborn, that time will continue to pass normally.
I am smart, educated, generally reasonable … and even so, I didn’t believe them.
The good moments are so good.
The first months of parenting for me have been ones of profound emotional alchemy. Because I’m tired and cranky and pissy and scared about what work will be like when I go back – what my career will be like. I’m wondering if I’ll ever write that book. I’m nervous about how this kid will change my marriage. I’m readying myself for my house soon being a fire hazard of toddler toys. I’m bracing myself for babyproofing and screentime conversations and Cocomelon, and I’m grappling with the fact that I’m now a person who knows what Cocomelon is.
But then, children are founts of endless wisdom. A recent conversation between me and my son:
HIM: Ah!
ME: Ah!
HIM: [slobbery] pbbpbpbpbpbbblt
ME: [slobberier] pbbpbbbpppbBBBPPPBPBPLLLLTT
HIM: Ah-eeeeee!!!!
ME: [cackling]
HIM: Ooooooooooo!!!
I’ve recorded some of these conversations on Voice Memos. They are the purest form of joy.
It’s not that a wonderful baby obliterates the hard stuff (and, make no mistake: my child is wonderful, awesome, in the original, dictionary sense of those words). Motherhood stalls careers and makes partnership harder. It makes your body and your brain squishier, at least temporarily.
It’s that there’s no weighing of the bad versus the good. It’s not apples and oranges; it’s oranges and free throw percentages, apples and symphonies — completely nonsensical. My baby is here, and the world wouldn’t be the same without him, so…comparisons just don’t work.
Thus far, I’ve found that the most useful word to describe it all is “and,” as opposed to “but.” It’s not “he wakes us up at 4 AM, but he’s cute,” but rather, he wakes us up at 4 AM and he’s cute. It all just coexists because it does.
He makes me worry viscerally, in an entirely new way, about school shootings, and he is genuinely funny.
He makes me nervous about my career prospects, and he smiles every time I enter the room.
He won’t nap anywhere but on our laps, and he gives me perspective on my petty furies and grudges.
He screams after every nap. Every nap. And also, he’s the best.
The best advice anyone gave me: You don’t have to know how to handle babies…you just have to know how to handle YOUR baby.
I have never been Good With Kids. I am not the fun adult who wrestles with the nieces and nephews in the swimming pool. I am not a natural at calming a baby. I can barely even talk to children (“So……Sport…..how’s the ol’...[long pause] alphabet?” “Good God, Aunt Danielle, I’m 11.”).
I’m still probably not Good With Kids. But I know the precise position (there is only one) in which my son will tolerate being held right now. And the pieces of artwork in our home he likes staring at the most. I don’t need to cheer up other kids; just this one. It’s fine.
—
I wrote my first motherhood essay early this year, just before giving birth. After I posted it, I heard from an array of women, and particularly from women who weren’t sure about whether to have kids.
I wish I could tell them how to decide. I…can’t. I mean, let’s be real: I’m a noob still. Four months in and doling out advice…pffffft. If you’re a veteran parent, by all means chortle away.
However, I can provide some info from the other side of the parent-nonparent divide.
Childless Me always hated hearing women say how motherhood changed them for the better. I felt like I was being told I couldn’t be a Real Woman or my best self unless I had a child.
And while I have changed in ways I can’t quite define yet, I’m definitely not saying motherhood completed me. One of the most liberating societal developments of the last few decades is the number of women who don’t feel obligated to have kids (or get married, for that matter).
But again: many things in my life are changed.
And so I once again present a list of ANDs.
My life options have shrunk some (I won’t be volunteering to report from Ukraine anytime soon; moving cities or even houses or jobs will be more difficult) AND I am tougher. I will have some (probably unfair) mom-guilt on presidential campaign trips this year, AND I am (it’s true, oh God it’s true and I don’t know how to feel about it) more patient than I used to be. I am better at time management, AND I can’t sit and watch a movie, read, whatever unless I first have this kid situated and happy.
I am overwhelmed and scared about the future, AND I am kinder to myself than I used to be.
So. I can only speak for me. And on that note, one more datapoint: if I could guarantee you a baby as awesome as mine, I’d tell you to do it, because mine is great.
But I can’t guarantee that, because Baby Kurtzleben is just that kickass.
(Kiddo, if you’re reading this in the future, the long and short of it is this: this early period has been very hard. And also, you’re the best and always have been. Of course it’s worth it.)
I had no time or energy to write a links section or anything additional. Tune in next time.
This is so lovely and so honest. It IS hard and yet better than anything else. I was never good with other people's kids either, but I adore my own, all teenagers now. Good luck, Danielle! Your baby is lucky to have you as a mom.
Thanks for sharing all this, especially the part about breastfeeding. So important to have the reminder that there is no shame in quitting. This mom to be thanks you!!