Last Sunday was Mother’s Day and also marked the 40th day of my baby boy’s life. I was for the very first time celebrated as a mother. It got me thinking about the days preceding and why people are not more frank about the hardships of motherhood. It is a question I asked in desperation to every mother who visited my dimly-lit room and watched me fumble with the one-too-many-buttons and vests that threaten to crush my infant’s little arms. I desperately reached out to all mothers hoping to hear them confess how crazy they were when they brought home their little “bundles of joy”. Surely they, like me, worried constantly that they had mistakenly poisoned their baby with Milton, burned their baby’s mouth with a boiled dummy or pinched his skin in the car seat strap. How can something so stressful leave you with much sense of enjoyment? The awesome moments where you fall asleep sniffing his beautiful head are quickly forgotten when you have been awake for 3 hours with what you are sure is a ground-breaking new back muscle ailment and trying to figure out why he won’t stop crying.
And then the answer dawned on me. The magical 6-week mark. It’s not a myth people. Everyone told me to hold on until then but the advice got lame-zoned along with all the others being thrown my way. But like clock-work, at 6 weeks, I fell deeply in love with my little boy. I am besotted. This feeling has replaced the sense of responsibility and the survival instinct that I have been depending on to keep him alive so far. At 6 weeks, babies are more responsive, they begin to smile and little patterns begin to form. In the first 5 weeks my little one seemed to be acting on instinct too but now I feel as if we have finally turned a corner.
Motherhood is 1 part love and 1 part confidence. Despite all the chaos, feeling love for him was the easy bit. I distinctly remember the first night we brought him home and we were taking turns going out of our minds. On my husband’s turn he looked at me and said “I can’t wind him, I don’t know what I’m doing”, to which I replied: “I know you don’t but don’t let him know that”. Ironically, I would be the one to reveal all my insecurities, lack of confidence and even anger and frustration to my baby boy over the 5 week period. It is a low-point in your life when you are asking a newborn why he won’t latch* or why he is drinking his bottle so fast when he knows that he will just get terrible winds later on. Learning to read a baby is something every mother is capable of doing with time. And at 6 weeks I was able to distinguish between different types of crying and at least have an action plan should the crying persist. I finally don’t feel like I’m drowning and I finally feel like I am all my baby needs to make it in this world. Built inside of me are all the answers and capabilities I just needed to build up the confidence to see it.
I can remember wishing the days away so that we could fast-forward to summer. Summer where we could eat fruit, spend days equally long and warm by the pool and wet wipes wouldn’t make him wince in pain. But now I understand why people miss this time in their baby’s life once it very quickly passes.
It’s magical not to wish you were in another place or time or even that you weren’t so damn tired all the time. It means things are pretty peachy just the way they are.
*Baby only started latching on the 38th day
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