What I Wish I'd Known About the First Year of Motherhood

Oh my god, my baby is one! (Or: Oh thank god, my baby is one!)

My daughter turned one the other week. We had a low-key party in a gazebo in South Pasadena with another family who has a daughter just a week younger than Juniper. The babies were given smash cakes and Juniper didn't really smash hers; she kept looking at me like she thought it might be a trap.

A little over a year ago, I was extremely pregnant and I spent my spare time trying to assuage my nerves by preparing myself for every possible scenario. I read so much about pregnancy and childbirth that I turned myself into the adult woman equivalent of a child going through their dinosaur phase, birth was my personal Tyrannosaurus Rex.

But the truth is that no amount of reading could have prepared me. Pregnancy, birth, and parenting an infant is something that can only be fully understood once it's experienced and even then, it's so subjective and personal that things that feel like immutable baby truths to one mother might seem completely off-base to another. So these are things that have been true to my experience. Maybe they'll be useful to somebody else whose experience overlaps with mine; maybe the function of this post will just be to capture this moment for posterity.

But here are the things that I wish I could go back in time and tell myself.

The work of parenting gets a little less thankless once the baby can smile and laugh. Note I didn't say it gets "easier;" some of the most challenging times raising Juniper came during so-called regressions. I slept so little that there were several times where I truly felt like I was going insane. But just as a decent paycheck sweetens an unpleasant job, a baby that seems more with it feels more rewarding to care for.

Every cool new thing they can do presents a new set of challenges but also makes the whole thing feel more like you're caring for a little human person instead of a seven-pound black hole of unending need.

Once they can say "Mama!" forget it. Now that she's starting to talk, I'd let my baby run me over with a car and I wouldn't even be mad.

Speaking of sleep, I should have never, ever, not once, not ever turned down an opportunity to take a nap, even a short one. Sometimes I'd get into an overtired frenzy where I was so tired that I wasn't functioning highly enough to produce work I could be proud of, but I also felt like I didn't have time to take a nap because I had work to do. Always nap at every opportunity! Sleep as much as you possibly can!

I was not prepared for just how disruptive having a child would be to my relationship. It's the most difficult change we've had to weather. It's almost impossible not to feel resentment during the months that he could go to the gym or go on a run and meanwhile my boobs were so heavy with the magic elixer of life that I couldn't go on a brisk walk without pain. The inherent unfairness of the division of the physical burden of motherhood combined with the asymmetry in how parenthood rewired our brains meant that sometimes I'd spend hours just seething over things neither of us had any control over.

There were times when my anxiety made me feel as though I could not trust anybody, not even my husband, to look after my baby. My reasoning -- again, this is Anxiety Reasoning, not Rational Thought-- was that I cared more than everybody else and therefore was the only one who could keep her safe. To quote Maury Povich, that was a lie. Anxiety is a liar.

Before I gave birth, most pregnancy literature said that after a vaginal delivery, sex is not recommended for at least six weeks. To that I would like to issue the most hearty of LOL's. I don't love talking about my own sex life (although in a way having a child is evidence that, at one time at least, I did have one) but I wish I could tell myself before I became a parent that parenthood is incredibly disruptive to sexual intimacy for months and months. Breastfeeding makes it worse. I wish I would have gone into this experience with a more realistic understanding of what could happen to my own sexuality as a result of having a baby. (Of course, some people bounce right back sexually after having a kid, and to that I say: congratu-fucking-lations to you. Rather than writing me a message about how wrong this paragraph is to your personal experience, why not go have some of that sex you've been getting nonstop since your baby was a month old?)

Beyond the physical toll that birth takes on a body and the hormonal cocktail that accompanies breastfeeding, the logistics of connecting with one's partner (even just to hang out on the couch spooning while watching movies) becomes much more difficult after having a kid. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies spend the first year of their lives sleeping in the same room as their parents. Where are these parents supposed to mess around? The kitchen floor? The uncomfortable couch? The American Academy of Pediatrics is a cock block.

I wish I'd never turned down the chance to hang out with my husband one-on-one, without the baby. I miss my precious alone time but when I spent too much time alone I'd get to seething (see above).

I would tell my one-year-ago self that the only way that things get easier is to do them. I was afraid to take Juniper out in public because I didn't know how to do things like go grocery shopping with a baby or quickly load and unload her into her stroller. I felt like I couldn't leave the house or run errands because I dreaded how difficult it was. I was afraid I would forget something. Well-- the only way I got better was to practice. Not every errand is going to go smoothly, but the more quickly I would have gotten comfortable taking Juniper with me as I went about my day, the less trapped I would have felt.

I wish I could tell my one-year-ago self that first time they get sick sucks and is scary, but it's inevitable.

I wish I would have known how many large plastic storage tubs I would need to cycle her belongings in and out of storage as she grew. I now buy about one large plastic storage tub per week. It's a good excuse to get out of the house, but having the ability to put things into storage as soon as they're no longer needed is essential to keep me from feeling like I'm drowning in baby stuff.

A lot of people told me to cherish the time that my daughter is a tiny little baby. I thought she was a pretty neat baby, but to be perfectly honest she's a lot more interesting now that she's trying to walk and pointing random objects and yelling "LUCA" (the dog's name), "DA-DA!" (she calls a stunning array of things "Dad," including pumpkins) or "FLA-WAH" (flower, which, oddly, was also one of my first words). Of course there's something a little sad about packing away her tiny clothes as she outgrows them or going up a size in diapers, but as she speeds out of infancy, there's more about her to love.

This is far from an exhaustive list, and hopefully these lessons or realizations will somehow serve somebody-- whether it's me raising another child or another person raising their own.

On to toddlerhood. How hard could it be? (lol)

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Original Illustration by Tara Jacoby