Dispatch From The 4th Trimester: It Sucks, But It Ends

Phew, glad that's over

My daughter is now three months old, which means I'm officially out of the so-called "fourth trimester," which is slang given to the newborn phase because newborn babies are functionally fetuses with social security numbers for a few months after they're born.

I'm no expert-- nobody is an expert on all babies or all postpartum bodies, even people who spend their lives trying to be-- but I can now share some broad strokes wisdom I've managed to catch in the lint trap of my broken brain these last 13 weeks.

There's no way around how scary it is at first.

If babies were video games, the only way to play would be on "expert" level and reliable tutorials would be nearly impossible to come by because every copy of the game would be wildly different, and if you lose the game-- often through no fault of your own-- it would bring the kind of devastation that can almost break a person.

I was terrified of Juniper when we brought her home from the hospital, for all of the regular reasons that new parents are terrified of their babies (and for other reasons that I'll probably disclose at some point in the future, when we're fully out of the woods). Babies can't tell you what's wrong except by crying. Something is usually wrong. It is your job to figure it out and fix it, or deal with unending baby crying, which on your parental brain sounds like how a blister feels.

There is no way around this. Even a close relative who is a pediatrician or a father-in-law who shows up at your house willing to change all of the diapers or a friend who brings you trays of oven-ready meals every day at dinner time can alleviate it. Help cannot save you from the fear.

The aftermath of birth was undersold.

I had an uncomplicated vaginal birth--which means that my recovery was the easiest possible type of childbirth recovery-- and the first month after having a baby was physically hellish in a way for which I was unprepared. I cannot stress enough how unpleasant it was. Getting into or out of a car was painful. Using the bathroom was painful. Sleeping wasn't restful. Every negative emotion I had was dialed up to 11. I was sad, I was gross, I smelled weird, and I had to take care of a baby that didn't even seem to like me.

But: While the postpartum period was hell, the worst of it ended almost as quickly as it began, around a month in. I'm still not all the way back to "normal," but enough time has passed now that I'm not sure I remember what normal is, which actually doesn't bother me.

You'll get better at it.

I can't tell if taking care of my kid has gotten easier or if I've just gotten better at it, but in the last month or so it's felt less overwhelming and more encompassing but engaging. Other parents tell me something similar-- there is a turn, at some point, maybe around three months, maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later-- when the day-to-day care of a baby becomes less bewildering.

For example: There are books and books about infant sleep management but very few books about troubleshooting a baby's digestive issues. We didn't realize for awhile that all of our baby's sleep and fussiness stemmed from her tiny, pukey stomach and, by extension, my diet-- very common among small infants but kind of difficult for a pre-verbal human to articulate. As soon as we figured that out, we could work to fix it.

You're not messing up if they cry a lot.

Babies cry. It's their main thing.

You're not messing up if you cry a lot.

I love my daughter, but I didn't always love the minute-to-minute experience of being a mother of a newborn.

Would anybody? Should anybody? It's hard. It's thankless.

Having a shitty day that ends in me going on a ten minute drive so that I can scream in the car does not make me ungrateful or bad. I don't have to smile as I'm waking up for the nth time in a bad night of sleep. I don't have to like it to make it through. You don't either. Just get through it without hurting yourself or anybody else.

Your baby will get cooler.

Juniper--like most human children-- had no personality when she came home from the hospital, and for a few weeks thereafter there was no indication that she was capable of experiencing any emotional states beyond hungry, angry, or asleep. Of course I loved her because she and I are tethered by the mystical thread that binds all mammals with their offspring, but she didn't have much to offer. I cared for her with life and death urgency because of the unsettling witchiness of new motherhood I suddenly felt crackling through me, not because she was a fun hang. For awhile there I wondered, against logic, if she was going to always be that way. (A month-plus of caring for a person who doesn't so much as crack a smile will do that.)

My daughter was a cranky little turnip, and then one day she wasn't. She started smiling, and then vocalizing, and then vocalizing in response to my husband and me. She didn't care about the mobile over her bassinet, and suddenly one day it was the most fascinating thing in the world. She didn't respond to my voice, and then one day, she did. Over the last weeks she's discovered babbling to herself. Over the last couple of days, she discovered randomly shrieking and grabbing for toys and hair. The positive changes accelerated throughout the last months, and now she's doing things that feel like legitimate attempts at communicating something beyond need. Newborns set the bar so low that the next step is pure delight.

Most advice people try to give you won't be helpful.... but some of it will be.

Unsolicited/unwanted/obvious advice from people who have no business issuing it is always annoying, but it's especially annoying when you're a new parent and you're trying your best and they're speaking to you as though you've never so much as seen a baby before having one. Plus, nobody but you has your baby, so nobody but you knows your baby.

However, once you skim off the obnoxious stuff, at some point, somebody is going to tell you something that will be helpful, and you don't want to shut them out.

One of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my friends was that I could put the baby down in her bassinet and go into another room for a few minutes if I was feeling overwhelmed. Seems simple, but it was helpful to hear it from another parent.

Sometimes advice becomes valuable as your child enters a new phase. For example: We were gifted so many swaddles. Parents we knew swore by them-- you gotta learn to swaddle, it's like magic. Books on subduing tiny babies claim that swaddling is the key. You'd swear swaddling was like a mute button for an infant.

But Juniper was immune to the spell of swaddling. At the beginning, it only worked half of the time, when she was already on the verge of falling asleep. We would have to gingerly clip her into her Snoo for it to even function. The times swaddling didn't work, we'd go into our room to find her screaming with one or both arms in the process of escaping the swaddle, like a tiny Houdini who hadn't quite mastered her act. But then, suddenly, one day it worked.

And I was glad we had all those swaddles.

This is temporary.

When a newborn baby is screaming and it's 5:12 am and you have to be up in an hour and a half, it's hard to see an end, but it will end.

Three months ago, nothing made Juniper happy except eating. She's still high maintenance compared to, say, a middle aged cat. But parenting feels more rewarding now that she is more like a little person and less like a despotic boy-king*.

I know that the next phase of her life will present new challenges, but, in the words of Washington Irving that I have somehow retained since college, "There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place."

Bring on the four month sleep regression.

*boy-king comparison brought to you (and me) by my husband

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