Life Lately in the Newborn Trenches

Keeping a newborn alive is so much harder that it seems. For planners like Simon and me, the degree of unpredictability was a hard pill to swallow as first-time parents. The stakes are ridiculously high as you juggle a new life and responsibilities (with no breaks) while your own body heals from the hardest thing it’s physically done. The house is a mess. Sleep is all over the place. People are giving you all kinds of unsolicited advice. The feeding process feels like a military operation. I spend my days in anxiety unable to truly rest, waiting for that cry to signal the next battle. The round-the-clock care is something we’ve never experienced before and testing every ounce of our patience.

We have a colicky baby, and figuring out newborn fussiness is the parenthood version of the diabolical Hunger Games arena that presents a different, terrifying threat on the hour. Just when you’ve learned to how to deal with one thing, another challenge arises. In the first few days, baby is adjusting to life outside womb, confusing day and night, cluster feeding, dealing with jaundice, losing weight and causing all kinds of panic. Just when the weight issue is settled, she begins witching hours, won’t sleep from overtiredness, and exceeds her wake windows. Then it’s uncomfortable growth spurts, gas pains, PURPLE crying, and the ever so mysterious colic. There are a million different old wives tales and pseudoscience theories to addressing fussiness, but they are only temporarily effective, contradictory to medical advice, or just plain crazy.

Some days I feel like I’m crushing it, like when I figured out a hack for entertaining myself with Netflix shows on the big screen while breastfeeding. And other days, I’m holding a hollering baby while bouncing on a yoga ball at 3am, begging her to stop crying while falling apart myself. One late night during her first week home, after an exceptionally hard day, I started jotting down a list of good things that happened that day, similar to what I did during early pandemic shelter-at-home days. Because even in the toughest of times, there is light.

Every drawing here represents a day in my life as a mother so far. Things can seem extraordinarily hard in the moment, but everyday is a fresh start. I’m trying to relish in the small joys of this experience as best I can, and treasure this special stage of newborn infancy before it passes in the blink of an eye.

Having a baby teaches you what matters most in life — the small moments where their tiny hands wrap around your finger. The tangible love you feel when their eyes find yours and look up at you with all the trust in the world. The most ordinary moments are the ones I’ll treasure most. As she grows, there will be lots more rewarding moments to savor.

But these first few weeks, we start with small joys.

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