1. It's
only .004% of your life.
If I could only say one thing to
every pregnant woman out there, it would be this: it's only a short
time. The sleeplessness and the feeding and the crying and the
leaking and the general overwhelming crappiness, it just goes by.
Everyone knows this intellectually and yet it's really hard to have
that perspective when it's 3am and you haven't eaten and you haven't
showered and the night just seems to go on and on forever and you
find yourself thinking, This is my life now, my horrible, horrible
life. Know that this is not the new normal, this is a blip. Just
buckle down and get through it and it's over. Unless and until you're
stupid enough to do it again.
2. Don't
do any big stupid things.
For the first year of this baby's
life, don't make any major decisions. Now is not the time to get
married, get divorced, quit your job, start a new job, buy a house,
sell a house, move across the country, or do things involving big
sums of money.
I hesitate to put this out there,
because I think a lot of the talk about pregnant women and new
mothers and their "mommy brain" is infantilizing and sexist
and reductive and yet—it's true, you
are really tired. You are tired even if you do not know you are
tired. I am an incredibly high-energy person, I had an easy baby who
slept through the night from a young age, I had a flexible job I
could do from home and a partner who wasn't awful all of the time,
and yet despite these things, I was still tired enough to find myself
standing on my porch trying to open my front door with my car clicker
and—get this—when it didn't work, actually thinking, It
must be out of batteries.
Almost the entire first year I had my
daughter I felt like I felt fine—it was only around the one-year
mark that I looked around and realized, I have been totally out of it
for the last year of my life.
And yes, there are hormonal
fluctuations to deal with, and maybe also issues with recovery or
feeding or postpartum depression or your work leave or the absence
thereof. And it's not just you, either. Your partner, if you have
one, is tired too, and stressed out, and also you may slightly hate
him or her most of the time now but you probably won't forever. So
what I'm saying is, maybe now is not the time to drop out of school,
leave your husband, and buy that dilapidated farmhouse.
3.
But feel free to do plenty of small stupid things.
Use this as your excuse to get a
tattoo, buy a butter churn, shave your head, or adopt a partially
blind rabbit. Hey, who's going to judge you? You're tired.
4. Go
out with your baby.
Immediately. Go. Right
now. By now I think most everyone knows that the grandmotherly wisdom
about taking young babies out of the house is wrong, and sure, if it
worries you, you can drive a few miles over to that other Starbucks
where the patrons look a bit less tubercular, but seriously, leave
the house early and often.
5.
Go
out without your baby.
Go out with your friends,
go out with your partner, go out by yourself. I know this isn't
easy—in fact,
I always get annoyed when people glibly advise you to
have a "date night" every week as though everyone in these
economic times can afford to spend an extra $50 a week on optional
childcare. But seriously, try. Hit up relatives, take turns watching
your friends' kids, drop your kid off in the ballpit at IKEA and go
eat meatballs in the cafe without her, just do something. If you
really can't get away, at least invite friends over to your place
after your baby goes to bed and go sit outside and light some candles
and pretend it's a sidewalk cafe.
Also, please don't call it
"date night." That is the worst phrase.
6.
Serve
alcohol at your baby's first birthday party.
Obviously.
7. Don't
bother reading to your baby.
Okay, fine, read to him if you
want to, but don't kill yourself over it.
Some people swear that their very
young infants love being read to, and it may be that some babies
(especially pre-mobile ones) enjoy the sound of the reading voice.
Beatrice had a brief flirtation with Fluffy
Chick and Friends around four months
old but once she could crawl and then walk, forget it. I spent
countless evenings doggedly reading Goodnight
Moon to an empty nursery while she
raced up and down the hallway beating the dogs with an empty paper
towel roll. Until she was about eighteen months old, Beatrice would
absolutely not sit still while being read to; now at three she has
memorized all the words to every book she owns, reenacts scenes from her
favorites, and is starting to sight-read some words. In other words,
she's fine and your baby will be, too, with or without Goodnight
Moon.
Writers and grad students, in
particular, love to talk about what adorably inappropriate thing they
read aloud to their precociously appreciative infant, and maybe Baby
Edgar really does sit rapt for whole chapters of your thesis on Being
and Nothingness, but it's more
likely he just lacks the dexterity to unfasten his bouncy seat. Or
perhaps young infants simply respond well to voices pitched at a
maximum level of self-satisfaction.
8. Get
over yourself.
No, this is a big deal, I get it.
I, personally, am genuinely glad to hear all about it. Call me up, I
can talk about babies all day. But respect the fact that your
non-baby-having friends have news, too. Yes, you're ragged and puffy
and sore and newly and wholly in love with a being whose waste has
suddenly turned a worrying shade of green, and maybe you aren't
actually all that riveted by the story of how Cary's boss was such a
bitch to her in that meeting, but fake it. Cary doesn't care all that
much about latching either, but she'll fake it, too, because you're
friends.
And please, while we're on the
subject, do not tell people without babies what they are missing, or
how they can't possibly know how parenthood feels until they try it.
No, of course they don't know how being a parent feels. I don't know
how it feels to be a man, or a hemophiliac, or a Hugenot. No one can
know how anyone else feels, that's the tragedy of existence, but
having a baby doesn't make you a guru, either. Go to any Babies R Us
on a Sunday afternoon and look around: does it look to you like all
the people in this store have access to a hidden well of radiant
cosmic knowledge?
9. Children
aren't always babies.
I was shopping alone at Target
when I was pregnant with Arthur and a woman, incorrectly assuming
this was my first baby, actually came up to me and said, "Enjoy
it now! Go shopping, go to the movies, because after the baby comes
you'll never do any those things again!"
Leaving aside the obvious point
that people with babies can and do go to the movies, I also like her
assumption that the baby I was about to birth would remain
one-month-old forever. My next-door neighbors have two boys in
college and they seem to go to the movies whenever they feel like it.
Maybe it's just the media I
consume, but I feel like there is a huge emphasis on parenting young
children, those under five or so, and then markedly less attention
placed on parenting after that. I imagine some of this is just
demographics—the people who write the articles I read are around my
age and so they have kids around the ages of my kids. But the effect
is to make you forget that these are your children and you'll have
them forever.
Inevitably there's someone on Pinterest who made a
photo album of her infant daughter dressed up every day like a
different kind of desert finch, and I will look at my youngest child,
who is fifteen months old, and seriously find myself thinking, "Well,
it's too late, you've blown it now, it's too late to make a film of
Arthur and all his hospital nursery roommates enacting tableaux from
Labyrinth,
so I guess you're done forever."
This is seriously insane. We've
barely even started making memories, we're not running out of time.
It's just that no one on Pinterest is making felt collages of their
kid's eighth year.
10. You
don't have to cherish every second.
You will be out with your baby and
some well-meaning person will tell you, "Savor every minute of
this time, it goes by so fast!"
This is a terrible thing to say.
It's true, but it's still a terrible thing to say.
"Savor it!" What if I'm not savoring it
enough?
I really like babies—plenty of
people don't, maybe you don't, and that's fine, too—but even I
can't savor a baby 24/7. Yes, with both of my children there were
times when I felt truly enraptured by my love of them, totally
connected to the wonder and joy of their burgeoning personhood, but
there were also times where I was a little burned out on their
burgeoning personhood and would really rather have just read the New
Yorker in peace. But every time I
would put the baby in his highchair and let him amuse himself with
some Cheerios while I caught up on "The Talk of the Town,"
I'd feel guilty.
Savor it! Why am I not savoring it?! This is his
brief, fleeting infancy, a time I will spend the rest of my life
longing for, a time to fill to brimming with memories, I should be
wringing every ounce of irreplaceable joy out of this afternoon instead
of feeding him handful after handful of Goldfish crackers so I can
finish reading Adam Gopnik's twee musings on Parisian deadbolts.
Yes, it goes fast, and then it's
over, and then there are whole new phases and problems. And yes,
you'll feel bad when they aren't babies anymore, but you would have
felt bad anyway, so at least you got to read that magazine. Don't
kill yourself. Have fun when you can, get through it when you must.
Relax. You have plenty of time to love them later.
11. Get
a dog. Your life is ruined
anyway, you might as well.
