The things they don’t tell you…

Disclaimer: As with almost everything in life, everyone will have their own unique experience. This is mine. Also the choice to become a parent should be exactly that. A choice. Many of the kindest, intelligent, most wonderful people I know have decided not to (or have yet to) become parents by choice or circumstance. I salute and respect you, I hope that when you read this post you can replace the words ‘baby’ with your closest most relevant appropriation. Because love is love and all challenges are challenging.

I have noticed many glaring fact omissions in the stacks of parenting and ‘what to expect’ type books that now collect carpets of dust on our bookcase. Facts that would have been nice to know. This is my list of the shit that people don’t tell you about having a baby and first time parenting.

LABOUR: Congratulations, a tiny naked stranger is about to exit the body of someone you love. Try not to freak out.

1. If you find yourself as the partner and support person in the situation of a C-section; don’t look past the blue curtain during the surgery. You will think that everyone is going to die and it will be hard not to tell your drugged partner/wife/birthing person that she should start working on her funeral arrangements immediately.
2. The baby is not the only thing that comes out of the body and your eyes do not need to see any of that.
3. During the course of labour the discussion of poop, pooping and feeling to poop is frequent. I suppose the geography of it all makes sense. Still, it is more frequent than you would expect.
4. Labour is intense and graphic and humbling and dirty and exhausting and magical in the weirdest way possible. There is a reason humans gestate for 9 full months. This labour thing needs time to mentally prepare for.

NEWBORNS: Congratulations, you brought your tiny, now no longer naked human, home and have to keep it alive.

1. If you like life to be predictable DON’T HAVE A BABY. Trying to carry out timed scheduled tasks in the first few weeks of life is like eating a bowl of soup on a trampoline.
2. In the first few weeks (and probably longer) you will get remarkably good at sleeping for the smallest increments of time. You will wake after your first uninterrupted 3 hour stretch and basically feel like you can do an entire marathon in kart wheel formation. This feeling of energetic elation will naturally last for only about 34 seconds, so relish it.
3. Yet when your baby does fall asleep you will immediately want to pick her up because looking at something so cute can cause your tired mind to malfunction. The cycle of non-productivity this causes is astounding.
4. Sharing your home with a newborn baby is like living with a dysfunctional drunk person. Their motor skills are rubbish. They make nonsense sounds and become completely hysterical when they need something. Usually something to drink.
5. Babies are jerks.
6. Newborns don’t smile right away as a ploy to trick you into working hard to keep them alive until they do. It is like waiting for that first pay cheque after working back to back weeks of overtime with no end in sight. If this were a real life paying job most people would quit and make a workplace safety report to HR.
7. You will learn to use the toilet while holding a baby. And even though babies don’t understand this yet, at some point during your baby will make eye contact with you and you will feel deeply judged.
8. Cutting baby fingernails is a travesty of nature. They should refrain from growing all finger and toe nails until they are school age (preferably college) because trying to carefully clip 20 miniscule digits is a skill nobody should have to master.
9. Sitting down to eat a warm plate of food will cause your sleeping, happy baby to inexplicably cry, no matter where she is. The idea of you enjoying a warm meal really pisses a baby off and they have such a stealthy, finely honed radar for this that war machines blush and wither in comparison.
10. Their poop comes in a shocking array of consistencies. Your google search history will break from asking the internet about baby poop. Which brings me to the next point…

TECHNOLOGY: Congratulations, you now only use the internet to google things about your baby, and have to accept that it can take you 17 mins to find an app on your phone (because you keep forgetting what you were doing).

1. Having a baby will just destroy your entire internet and social media search engine history. Your Google search history is now forever tarnished. Facebook ads and links are now rife with parenting advice, suggestions, and tips on how to baby your baby the best any baby can be babied while having them wear jaunty baby blankets and baby hats. Your Amazon page will randomly recommend nipple shields. Your online media is now totally wrecked. (Also never google mucous plug. I warned you.)
2. Your otherwise normal persons’ phone camera roll will be overrun with eruptions of baby pictures. You will have to scroll through weeks of images of a little bald person to even glimpse an inkling of what you ever photographed before. It will become a literal documentation of how fast your life has changed.

BREASTFEEDING: Congratulations, you have made the decision to feed your baby with liquid gold breast milk. 

1. Breastfeeding a baby with food that your body engineered is nature at its best. I mean really, the ability of the body to generate the most nourishing food for such a perfect, fragile diminutive creature is truly remarkable.
2. Breastfeeding can be one of the most unnaturally natural things to master. The posters of the doe eyed baby and mother looking lovingly into each-other’s eyes should really be replaced with pictures of angst ridden worry, cracked nipples, pain, tears, confusion, trepidation and floods of feeling inept after having just gone through a major trauma to your body. It is hard.
3. Like any skill it needs to be practiced and slowly mastered. For many, many women it doesn’t come naturally. Except attempting to learn such a very fine tuned skill with a hungry screaming infant in your arms is no joke. It’s like trying to learn to ride a bicycle with a flaming seat.
4. You will smell like stale milk for most of your waking hours.

LIFE & RELATIONSHIPS: Congratulations, you now have created an entire new person. Now what?

Food:

1. Your entire social structure has now changed completely, almost overnight. But if you have lived a good life, you will be inundated with mounds of delicious lasagna (or some sort of pasta type meal) You will eat mouthful after mouthful of this food that magically keeps appearing on your doorstep and praise the heavens for the amazing friends and family you have in life. Live a good life and there will be lasagna. 

Productivity:

1. Technically having a (first) baby usually allows you to ‘clear your schedule’ for the first few weeks in preparation. Yet you will spend hours just staring at her face. You will struggle to finish the book you have borrowed from the library and have extended so many times that you no longer can extend it anymore even though you only have, like 12 more pages to go, and you are sure the library is all like “Tracy stop extending this renewal, give us back our goddamn book” You will then take another week to read the last page and finally return it.
2. You will not know how, but the hours’ will slip by. Your days will blur and you can either try to swim upstream or pile yourself and family on that old flotation device and know that the river is where it’s all at.

Love: 

1. The love you had for your partner before entering this journey will change. You will be shocked by how much more love you are actually capable of. The look of all-embracing adoration your partner gives your baby will make you feel such a profoundly deep primal reverence that you will continuously keep falling over and over in love at the slightest things. It can be giddying.
2. When you see your baby for the first time you will ache with love. Whether you know it at the moment or not. You will feel inexplicably splintered because your capacity for this much love is now extended too far out of the radius of the walls of your brain and chest. This teeny foreigner will have already absconded with your heart before you even have a chance to consider offering it. Babies are thieves.

All of us humans are parents/nurtures to some degree. Whether you are a parent by birth, support, adoptive, situational, friend or just have an unabashed love and passion for something or someone, you are love. Never forget that.