Monday, July 12, 2010

The Truth about Babies

Every baby shower I attend we have to do that silly thing where every veteran mom in the room writes a little note to the new mom/mom-to-be with some little bit of advice about babyhood, infancy, whatever.

And each time I have to write something I'm taken back to Alyssa's first few months of life and I almost always write:

"Don't do anything about your relationship with your child's father during the first year of your new baby's life. You will like him again."

I'll be honest...during those first months, I wondered if Tom and I would survive the stress of being new parents.

It was so hard. There were times when I know we didn't like each other very much. Though we'd discussed parenting values, ect while I was pregnant with Alyssa, the actual act of parenting was so different. And we disagreed. And I always, ALWAYS took it personally when he made a suggestion of any kind.

Yeah, it was mostly me. While I didn't suffer ppd, I did suffer a lot of angst, a lot of doubts and whenever Tom made a suggestion of any kind, I thought he was saying, "You're really bad at this. Let me fix you."

And I hated that.

I got to visit with my cousin Emily a couple of weekends ago. She's got a beautiful, fat eight-month-old daughter. And she's still in that first year, obivously. I reminded her that she once loved her husband and that she will love him again. She laughed through tears and said that she wishes people would tell new moms that sometimes your new baby will not like you.

I told her that most of the time, new babies don't like anything or anyone, they just want to eat, poop and hopefully, sleep.

Olivia was such miserable baby. I told this to Emily, pointing to my laughing, running three year old and said, "It gets better, Em. It really does."

And it will for her. Stella will discover that her mom is the coolest person in the whole world and Emily will see that all of her sacrifices and all the work she's put into that little girl will pay off.

But yeah, in the beginning, that baby doesn't like you very much and often, you don't like your spouse very much. But, hopefully you're like me and it gets to much better, so good that you barely remember how hard and stressful it once was.

Even if your three year old squeaks at you, "I hate you forever!" Yeah, she said that this weekend. But three minutes later, she insisted she loves me. So whatever. If babies are hateful, three year olds are fickle.

No comments: