Anna McGrail - You and Your New Baby

The reality may not hit you until you are actually back at home, as it did Kay: ‘ I was in hospital for a week and all that time I kept thinking at the back of my mind that they’d never really let me leave with this baby because he wasn’t really mine. Of course, I’m saying all this, I knew he was mine, I knew it rationally, but deep down … I just kept having this niggling doubt that I’d have to hand him hack before I got in the lift to go home. It was a bit of a shock that I didn’t! ’

Darren thought going home would be a time of rest and peaceful ‘daddyhood’: ‘ Even before we left the hospital, on our way down in the lift, the nurse who was carrying the baby down for us was saying to Maureen, “Oh, it’s lucky you’ve got your husband at home for a few days, that’ll be a help,” and I was thinking, “What can I possibly do to help?” I had no idea of the work involved. I imagined that Maureen would breastfeed, the baby would sleep a lot, smile at me from time to time … and I would help, I’d change the odd nappy or two. But that was all. I had no idea .’

HOME MAY be the place you most want to be in the first few days, but even so, it can take some getting used to.

Naomi had been in hospital for quite a long time: ‘ Although there are compensations, like you get your medicines brought round, and the meals just appear, there are still so many constraints; like, if your baby’s crying when the meal arrives, your dinner just goes cold – no one’s going to pop it in the oven for you because there isn’t an oven .’

Rowena’s husband began to long for some privacy, even at home: ‘ People were in and out all those first few days and it seemed like we’d never get any peace and quiet. People kept saying things like, “Oh it’s so lucky you’ve got Peter here to help for a bit”, and I was getting cross because all I was doing to help was making them tea .’

David found himself impressed by Tina’s growing knowledge and let himself be guided by her: ‘ We’d been living with Tina’s parents and had only moved into our own flat three or four weeks before and there were still things in boxes that we hadn’t got round to unpacking. We’d borrowed a cot from Tina’s sister and put it up in the bedroom, next to our bed, and Tina put the baby in there when we got back from the hospital because the baby was asleep, and he looked so small and lost in there I wanted to take him straight out again. But Tina had put him in, so I didn’t. She already seemed to know what was best because she’d been with him all the time in the hospital and I hadn’t .’

First days

YOU MAY BE new to the job and feel that you’re dependent on ‘experts’ but no one knows your baby as well as you already do. It is surprising how quickly we learn to read our baby’s signals, even when we may have had little to do with babies before. It is astonishing how much our instincts are right, and perhaps in itself this may give us confidence.

Philippa’s baby’s umbilical cord hadn’t quite healed properly: ‘ So the midwife didn’t discharge us at ten days like she was supposed to and I was really disappointed by that. I wanted to move on, and I felt this was holding us back in some way. I wanted the reassurance that everything would be alright, but I also wanted to take on the responsibilities myself .’

With that responsibility, though, however much it is wanted and welcomed, can come uncertainty, as Sally clearly knows: ‘ My brain has gone. It sometimes feels like a big empty space in my head where I used to do thinking. I don’t even look at newspapers any more because they don’t make sense. Or if I do pick up a newspaper, I always seem to find things in there that upset me, and more and more things upset me now. I end up crying over news stories. It feels much safer, in a way, just having me and Kevin in our little world .’

Umbilical clip.

THIS INSTINCT to nurture and protect, almost to make a ‘nest’, is very strong in many parents in the first weeks of their baby’s life. For some people, this ‘nesting’ instinct began to manifest itself in late pregnancy with an urge to repaint the spare bedroom. If, during late pregnancy, your nesting instinct prompted you to do something slightly more practical, like freeze a month’s worth of nutritious dinners, then you will be more thankful now than you could ever have believed. This is because, when your baby arrives, something odd seems to happen to time.

For Gillian the change was dramatic: ‘ Life is so slow now, that’s the thing I can’t get used to. It takes all day to do anything. It’s ten in the morning and I’m still in my dressing-gown and the baby’s having her third feed of the day and I’m wondering if I’m ever going to be able to get dressed and get to the shops. And yet, because there’s never a moment to do anything or finish anything, it’s all packed in so tight and the time rushes by. What happens to it? This is the thing they don’t tell you .’

The rhythm of life is very different in these early days. Some parents adjust to it almost at once; others find the change of gear much more difficult to accept. Rose felt nothing could prepare her for how she would feel: ‘ I found the first few weeks very difficult. Life was so different to how I imagined it was going to be, and so different to everything I’d ever experienced before, that I felt like I’d been thrown in the deep end and was going to drown, while all the time I smiled and everyone thought I was paddling along happily. I loved him, I loved him but I wasn’t enjoying him .’

As Yvonne points out, your daily pattern does change but sometimes it can seem slow to do so: ‘ At about three months I thought I’d start giving Andrée some carrots mashed up or something, potato, things like that, and I gave her tiny amounts on the end of a teaspoon and she would spit some out and enjoy others, and I liked that, watching her decide. But more than anything I liked having something different to do. It felt like every day was going to be the same. Baths, feeds, nappy changes, showing her books … apart from the baby clinic, where they had a mother-and-baby club afterwards, there was nothing to make one day different from another. I might do a trip to the shops one day, a walk to the woods another. But that was it. I needed to feel that we were going to move on, that Andrée wasn’t always going to be totally dependent on me in this way, and I think those first teaspoonfuls of carrot were one way of reminding myself of that .’

For some parents, the surprise is how much they take to parenthood, as Rachel happily remembers: ‘ The one thing that I wasn’t prepared for is how lovely it would be. And I didn’t realise how happy I would be. People just don’t tell you that. When you’re a mother, you don’t find yourself saying to other mothers, “Isn’t this wonderful?” You find yourself saying, “Are Pampers or Boots nappies better?” So I didn’t know how absolutely wonderful it would be. There is a negative side, because I also didn’t realise how much my life … well, how unselfish you have to become. You always have to put the baby before yourself. You stop doing things you enjoy doing because the baby comes first. But I enjoy feeling that she depends upon me. It makes me feel very special .’