I come home from my postpartum shifts often with the thought “parenthood is so hard!” on my mind.

Sometimes I share this with my partner, who appears blank. We are planning to embark on this journey together, and I have historically been the more gung-ho of us on the topic.

“Yes,” he sometimes says, “and I’m sure it’s different when it’s your own child.”
“YES,” I sometimes reply. “Then it’s ALL THE TIME.”

DOULA PRIVILEGE

As a doula, I have the intimate privilege of joining people in their early-family bubble. I get to see mothers at their most vulnerable, fathers at their most proud, and couples at their absolute most exhausted.

I see, in real-time, all of the sayings about birth and new parenthood come alive before my eyes: it’s the best, but also the worst. You will never be the same. It’s the best thing you’ve ever done. You will never have been more tired.

What strikes me the most about the postpartum period is the unrelenting presence of the baby. Yes, of course, the baby is always there. (That’s what you wanted, right?)

But the baby, even if pretty constantly sleeping, is not mute. The baby is constantly making noises. And these are not ignorable noises—these are the exact noises that your exhausted and overwhelmed brain is precisely tuned to not be able to ignore.

SLEEP

Trying to sleep next to a bassinet with your deeply-sleeping newborn? Great! Get ready to perk up involuntarily every 30 seconds to 20 minutes at the slightest sound of gurgling, grunting, rapid breathing, sudden shifting, or dream-yelps.

But go ahead, sleep when the baby sleeps.

The new baby sleeps in maybe 3-hour increments at night? That sounds manageable. Except that reflux prevention dictates holding them upright for 15 minutes after feeding, and newborn sleep cycles happen every 30 minutes, so by the time you put them down they’re about ready to do their disconcerting between-cycle shuffle again to keep you on your toes about whether they’re going to stay asleep.

EAT

Adults eat on schedules. Sure, we have the occasional snack when we’re a little off our meal ritual (or maybe we live on snacks). But we can pretty much predict when we’ll be hungry and how hungry we’ll be.

Not newborns! Newborns are hungry a) all the time and b) somehow also unpredictably, refusing to eat in favor of sleeping or refusing to sleep in favor of eating (again (and again (and again?!))).

One is drawn to wonder just how many growth spurts one human can have.

Don’t get me started on formula and human milk and bottles. For one thing, I have a lot of opinions. For another thing, I haven’t fed a human with my own body yet, so I feel I don’t have the experience to back up my opinions.

I do know that the amount of time spent feeding an infant begins to feel absurd after a lifetime of learning to be a productive, creative, efficient adult.

Are parents really prepared for this? There’s no way. This is on the level of an obsessive phone-game addiction. Except it’s a real human life game that you can’t quit cold-turkey at any time.

HOLD, PLEASE

News flash: babies like to be held. And by “like” I mean, “are thereby existentially comforted and made secure in their basic humanness.” No big deal.

Putting the baby down seems to be the number one goal of most postpartum clients, day or night. Not to their fault—again, we’ve spent our whole lives figuring out how to not be burdened in our daily movements, and now they’ve got an egg they have to protect from cracking, or whatever the traditional school-project version of parenthood is.

However, what we know about secure attachment points to not putting the baby down as the ideal goal. I don’t know if it’s information lag getting in the way of this being more widespread, or work culture, or what. Babies are supposed to be worn, not swaddled and put down.

(Maybe this is another lack-of-experience problem. Maybe I haven’t worn one baby consistently enough to realize the error of my thinking. Maybe there are some babies who don’t want to be worn at all.)

Baby-wearing is not just for outings. Baby-wearing is for around the house, for chores, for rest time, for meal time. Baby wearing is definitely for work.

WORK

This brings me to my least favorite postpartum feature of all: going back to work.

People decry the lack of parental support in this country, and they should. AND, it has to be taken into consideration that parents can choose to become parents (these days, for now) and also choose their jobs. Parents can negotiate with their jobs, and parents can have boundaries.

Parents take the standard offers from their workplaces without question, and parents do not budget for extra time off work. Parents are working paycheck to paycheck and planning to train their baby to sleep through the night and drink from a bottle by six weeks old so that they can get back to their normal schedule.

Parents are not only unsupported in this culture—they are misinformed. They are misinformed about the reality of physiologic birth (more on that in another post), and they are misinformed about the real needs of their family in its infancy.

Parents have been deluded into thinking that the best thing they can do for their family is to work. This is true monetarily—money does buy happiness. However, this is not true in the temporal sense, where crucial times of bonding take precedence over long-term security.

Parents very often seem to choose parenthood in order to get the result of having had a child. The importance of the very beginning of this process—preconception, pregnancy, birth, and the immediate postpartum—is extremely overlooked.

What if the work of parenthood is more important than the work of industry? What if we treated it that way?

The complete absence of babies in workplaces is a crying shame (as it were). This is a whole thing about feminism, but basically babies should be commonplace and people should get used to it. You were a baby once, too.

A CRY FOR CHANGE

Here’s my manifesto: We have to be the change. Consumers’ demands must be made to hospital administrations, and workers’ demands must be made to workplaces.

Families must demand and protect the right to form and to bond with great care and support.

No one is ready to be sleep-deprived and flying a plane they’ve never flown before with their most precious fellow humans on board.

I believe that everyone who wants to parent should take a doula training. (I secretly believe that everyone who has been born should take a doula training.)

I believe that if a majority of the population knew what it takes to grow and raise a baby, there would be less violence.

I believe that if the majority of the population had an understanding of the fierceness they would need to defend their sanity in new parenthood, there would be less burnout for everyone.

I believe that babies can teach us to slow down and to remember how to live, if we would just be willing to learn from them.

I AM THE BABY

As I have worked with different age groups, I find each subtly teaching me and healing my traumas from those ages. We learn so much from children—to play, to see life with fresh eyes, to distill things to their simplicity. We also learn our own innocence.

Taking care of newborns, I notice myself hypnotically following their lead in the basic acts of living. “What do you need? Do you need food? Rest? Comfort? Expression? Cleanliness?”

After years of therapy and self-help and meditation and just trying to calm down, newborns may be my most profound teacher. They are practicing exactly what I have grown up trying to leave behind: simple needfulness.

When I come home from the rhythm of newborn life, even as “parenthood is hard!” echoes in my brain, I slip automatically into tending to the simplicity of my own body. I listen to its cries, and then I give it what it needs (and what, perhaps, it was not allowed as a newborn).

The newborn mind asks: What do I need?

Do I need food? Rest? Comfort? Expression? Cleanliness?

It doesn’t hurt to cycle through them all, multiple times; and, when nothing seems to be correct, to simply say, as to a new baby, “I know. I know. You’re here. You’re safe. I’m with you. I love you.”

This may be the secret sauce of new parenthood. Not just to take time, to slow down, to be forgiving and ask for help—but to become newborn.

Being newborn is being utterly basic. It is not easy, but it is surreal and it is miraculous. Maybe if parents—new or not—can give in to the newborn within themselves, it can all make a little more sense.