Zero to Five. Tracy Cutchlow

You feel overwhelmed. Not like “Hey, this new-mom thing is hard.” More like “I can’t do this and I’m never going to be able to do this.”

      • You feel guilty because you believe you should be handling new motherhood better than this. You feel like your baby deserves better.

      • You don’t feel bonded to your baby. You’re not having that mythical mommy bliss that you see on TV or read about in magazines.

      • You continually feel irritated or angry. You have no patience. Everything annoys you. You feel resentment toward your baby, or your partner, or your friends who don’t have babies. You feel out-of-control rage.

      • You feel nothing but emptiness and numbness. You are just going through the motions.

      • You feel sadness to the depths of your soul. You can’t stop crying, even when there’s no real reason to be crying.

      • You can’t bring yourself to eat, or perhaps the only thing that makes you feel better is eating.

      • You can’t sleep, no matter how tired you are. Or maybe all you can do is sleep. Whichever it is, your sleeping is completely screwed up, and it’s not just because you have a newborn.

      • You can’t concentrate. You can’t focus. You can’t think of the words you want to say. You can’t remember what you were supposed to do. You can’t make a decision. You feel like you’re in a fog.

      • You feel disconnected. You feel strangely apart from everyone, like there’s an invisible wall between you and the rest of the world.

      • You might be having thoughts of running away and leaving your family behind.

      • You’ve thought of driving off the road, or taking too many pills, or finding some other way to end this misery.

      • You know something is wrong, that the way you are feeling is NOT right. You wonder if you’ve “gone crazy.”

      • You are afraid that this is your new reality and that you’ve lost the “old you” forever.

      • You are afraid that if you reach out for help, people will judge you. Or that your baby will be taken away.

      Used with permission

Expect conflict as a couple

      Two-thirds of couples struggle with their marriages soon after baby arrives.

      The majority of couples report a drop in marital satisfaction after baby. It hits its lowest point when the kids are teenagers, and it doesn’t rebound until the kids move out.

      Why is this important for baby? Because if you’re stressed out and fighting—or headed toward divorce—you’re creating a home environment that hurts your child’s brain development.

      A few factors put you at higher risk for a drop in marital satisfaction:

      • If the mother’s parents are divorced or had high levels of conflict

      • If you lived together before getting married

      • If you had a baby soon after getting married (waiting gives you more time to get on the same page about relationship responsibilities)

      • If you have a lot of negative communication and didn’t handle conflict well before baby

      • If one of you didn’t want a baby but caved in

      Well, that covers just about all of us.

      The good news

      In a third of relationships, marital satisfaction stays the same or improves after baby. What are they doing right? They’re choosing empathy (see page 127), dealing with conflicts lovingly (see page 128), sharing the chores (see page 16), and building a great support network (see page 8).

      You can make a concerted effort to do these things, too.

      The transition to parenthood is tough

      Four studies of marital satisfaction ask different questions but arrive at similar answers.

      Source: C. Walker, “Some Variations in Marital Satisfaction.” Copyright Elsevier. Used with permission.

Know you can’t truly be prepared

      You’re going to be clueless, and that’s OK.

      Having a baby is a culture shock. As much time as you spent planning for this, it all becomes real quite suddenly. You don’t speak baby’s language; you’re not sure what she’s trying to tell you. You feel incompetent when it comes to the most basic things, like how much this little human needs to eat or how she wants to sleep. You’ve never been in such close contact with spit-up, drool, pee, and poop—things you’d previously tried to avoid. You barely recognize your house, as cleaning falls to the wayside and baby stuff piles up. Your senses become heightened: you start to hear baby’s cries when there are none, or you bolt upright in bed with the urge to make sure baby’s still alive. Time ceases to have meaning. When baby cries inconsolably, minutes feel like hours. When you look into baby’s eyes, cuddle, and kiss baby’s soft skin, hours feel like minutes.

      It’s an adventure, and generally you feel up for it. Plus, baby sleeps a ton at first, giving you a little time to adjust.

      However, many first-time parents also face an additional challenge that hits hard. It could be postpartum depression. It could be that baby is colicky, or underweight, or not latching at the breast, or premature. It could be that you’re an ambitious person and haven’t yet figured out that you’re trying to do too much. For my husband and me, it was sleep deprivation.

      Feeding baby was taking two hours—and you’re supposed to feed a newborn at least every three hours. I wasn’t producing much milk, but I didn’t want to give up on breastfeeding. So the hospital had us taping a tiny tube to my breast, and passing milk through it using a syringe. That way, baby was still “nursing.” Getting this tube to stay in place and getting baby to latch was indescribably time-consuming and frustrating. If baby let go, we’d have to start all over. Then switch breasts. Then I’d use a breast pump. Then my husband would sterilize all the equipment. We were reeling from lack of sleep.

      My husband and I rarely fight, but suddenly we were arguing over critical things like whether the phrase “Don’t cry over spilled milk” referred to the child or the mother. Emotions ran high or low, nothing in between. I remember walking down the street in broad daylight and bursting into tears. My husband blurted out, “Where are the joys of parenthood?” Within ten days, we ditched the syringe, switched to bottles, I pumped less often, and we caught up on sleep.

      Gradually, we defined, then accepted, then embraced, our new normal as parents. Soon enough, we felt like we were getting the hang of things. And you will, too.

      Not that parenting will suddenly become easy. With a baby, just about every day has highs and lows. Woven throughout moments of frustration, anxiety, and exhaustion are moments of such immense joy, strength, determination, humor, and love. These blissful times more than erase the hard ones.

      I remember one sunny day when my baby was 7 or 8 months old. Walking through a beautiful forested park, I told her how the leaves had fallen from the trees. I sat in a swing with her facing me in my lap, and as we swung, she leaned against my chest and smiled a supremely content little smile. This made such happiness well up inside me that I laughed out loud, hugged her to me, and said, “I love you so much!”