Things I wish I could tell pre-baby me
Or: Advice for new parents
My second baby is miraculously hitting the 5 month mark next week, which means I’m firmly past the newborn stage, but not so far beyond it that biology hasn’t wiped my memory of what pregnancy and immediate postpartum are like.
The last three years — from when my husband and I decided we were ready to have kids through to now —my life outside of work has been fully consumed by pregnancy, parenthood, then pregnancy and parenthood round two, so this is really the first chance I’ve had to step back and consider: What did I learn?
Reflecting on it has helped me wrap my head around how I’ve changed since becoming a mom and has solidified a few things I wish I could tell the me of three years ago — and since I can’t travel in time, you get the benefit of my experience.
First, a mess of disclaimers to cover my ass:
If you’re not in the right headspace to read about any of this, feel free to close out. I get it.
Some of these will only apply to the person giving birth. I’m going to use parent/mom mostly interchangeably.I’m focusing mostly on pregnancy and the first few months of newborn life, plus a dash of life with 2 kids under 2 years old. I reserve the right to change my mind as my kids get older.
If none of this is helpful for you, or you vehemently disagree with me, or you think I’m a bad mom, I kindly ask you keep that feedback to yourself or your group-chats.
Finally, I don’t plan on this newsletter regularly being about parenting or motherhood — in fact, the next one you get will be the big book announcement!!! finally!!!— but right now, I have a 2 year old and a nearly 5 month old, so this is what’s on my mind.
With that out of the way: If I could go back in time and talk to myself before I had kids, here’s what I would say…
The process of trying to get pregnant will teach you your first lesson of parenthood: You have absolutely no control over anything. (h/t my therapist, who did actually say this to me early on, and it really helped.)
The way you feel about pregnancy has no relationship to the way you will feel about parenthood.
There are supposedly people out there who love pregnancy; who lean in to the magical, empowering, fertility-goddess type shit. You are not one of them. You will feel nauseous for months and like you’ve got a parasite eating you from the inside out.
You will hate the physicality of it, the exhaustion, the hormonal roller coaster, and the sense that your body is no longer your own. The good news is that, just as the doctors promised you, nearly all of your physical ailments are cured by delivering the baby. The better news is that as much you hate pregnancy, you love motherhood. (The downside of that: You’ll be willing to do pregnancy again, knowing it will end.)Pelvic floor physical therapy is a godsend and should be standard care for all pregnant women.
When you are induced at 37 weeks for health reasons with your first baby, you will want to try and tough it out, and wait until you feel like you deserve the epidural before you ask for one. When the pitocin contractions kick in and are 3 minutes apart (but you for sure aren’t ready to push yet,) the labor & delivery nurse will gently say to you:
“No one gets a medal for doing this the hard way.”
You will get the epidural within the next hour. For your second baby, who also needed to get evicted at 37 weeks for health issues, you will get the epidural before they start any other drugs, making the whole thing much more enjoyable.
You will think about that nurse’s words at least once a week, both in parenting and outside of it.
You will come to realize: There are parts of pregnancy and early parenthood you cannot take a short-cut through — you cannot get around the baby needing to eat every 3 hours, or changing the ungodly diaper, or being peed on at least once. But when there are opportunities to pick the easier way, you should pick it. If you can afford to spend the money on a gadget that will make your life easier, get it. “It was the most convenient” is a totally legitimate reason for a decision.
Don’t valorize suffering.The spicy tuna rolls and salmon sushi you get delivered to the hospital within two hours of having each baby — the second time around, ordered well after midnight, thank god for New York City — will be the best things you’ve ever eaten. You’ll dream about them.
With your first kid, you will breastfeed for three months. Much like with pregnancy, it will not be the magical experience the internet sold to you. The physical discomfort, combined with the anxiety about her eating enough, compounded by hours of endless scrolling while she nurses will make you feel nutty. Cluster-feeding will make you want to climb out of your skin — tears will stream down your face when the baby cries out of hunger just a few minutes after eating. Pumping makes you feel like a cow attached to a robot; it drains you of both milk and your humanity.
You will spend much of the last month of those three reading every single study you can find about the value of breastfeeding. One day you will come upon a Reddit thread from kindergarten teachers, one of whom says “I couldn’t tell you which kids were breastfed or formula fed, but I can absolutely tell you whose parents read to them at night.”
That is what clicks. Once you decide to stop nursing, you will want to be done as fast as humanly possible — the ensuing hormone crash that no one warned you about will leave you with four weeks of panic attacks about the dog possibly eating the baby.
When you switch to formula and a strict 3-hour-bottle-in-mouth regime, the baby starts sleeping through the night within days.
When your second kid is born, you will start with formula right from the hospital.
The first two weeks at home, while your husband is on his limited family leave, he’ll take all the night feeds so you can get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep for the first time since the first trimester.
You will regret nothing. You’ve seen your toddler eat blueberries off the floor of a Brooklyn grocery store — you now know how little most things matter.An unbelievable amount of time in the first 6-8 weeks of your newborn’s life is spent helping them fart. Your kids respond well to bicycle kicks, the football hold, and lots of burping. When in doubt, stick the baby in a warm bath.
Some people encounter great joy and friendship in the mostly-mom groupchats of strangers across Brooklyn. You will enjoy lurking in them, and sometimes the meet-ups are nice, but you will find more value in your small network of women you know from work or college, with whom you have more in common than just “our due dates were around the same time.” There is nothing that makes you feel more seen than that text from another mom asking about your first postpartum poop.
As someone who thrives on being busy and productive, you will find the groundhog-day-like nature of caring for an infant combined with the isolation from normal adult conversation makes you feel discombobulated. Reframing your to-do list as simply two things — (1) survive and (2) keep baby alive, fed, and clean — helps, because each day you do that, you’ve succeeded.
Going back to work will come with its own challenges, but turning your brain back on will help you start to reclaim your sense of self. That doesn’t make you a bad parent.You will cry the first day of daycare for each of your kids. It will feel impossible to hand off such a tiny baby; you will physically ache the first time you walk away from the daycare center.
This is true even as you know: Daycare is the best money you spend each month.
Those women are professionals; you are but an amateur. They love your children as much as you do, and the routine of daycare gives your kids the structure needed to thrive (and allow you the flexibility to deviate from it on weekends without wrecking them.) The caregivers also teach you how to be a parent, nudging you through nap transitions, solid foods, and potty training.
The first day your kid is at daycare for the full 9 hours, you will realize that for you, full time childcare is how parenting becomes sustainable. Long weekends will reinforce that: Being a stay-at-home parent is a job — an extremely hard one — and like many many jobs, it is not one you are well-suited for.
Plan ahead to give as much as you can afford for holiday gifts — if there was any justice in the world, those caregivers would be millionaires.The way you will not just survive but thrive in parenthood is by getting out of the house as much as possible. Spend the money on the things that make that easier — strollers, a comfortable carrier, museum memberships, and the like — and go cheap on things the baby shits or spits on (clothes, burp clothes, blankets, sheets, etc) Embrace the great circle-of-baby-stuff-life that exists in Brooklyn, and enjoy the thrill of the hunt of the good deal on Park Slope Parents.
Take the newborn out to dinner, or to the movies, or strap her to your chest while you get a pedicure. Take her to things you want to do; she’s a baby — she doesn’t need “entertaining” just yet. A year from now you will have a toddler who demands to be chased down the sidewalk while you scarf down your meal. Enjoy the ease of a sleepy potato.
Babies are people, not robots, and their personalities and temperaments come mostly pre-baked. What you do only matters around the margins — one will like a pacifier, the other will prefer a thumb. One will rarely giggle, the other will be extremely smiley. Both your kids are generally good sleepers, but you are acutely aware that is 99% luck and possibly 1% “keeping the monitor on mute because you live in a small apartment.”
As they grow, you will get to know them and figure out their preferences; what works for one baby may not work for the next. Let that liberate you: There is no right way to parent, only the right way for your family.
That last part is key. When the baby is born, you will be under the impression that the most important unit of measurement in the decision-making equation is “the baby.” You will be wrong, and you will be even more wrong when the second baby is born. The most important unit of measurement is “the family.”You will be surprised and grateful by who shows up for you postpartum and disappointed by who does not. You will remember what was helpful — homemade food or delivery giftcards, adult company, juicy gossip, people texting to check in on you in the weeks and months after delivery — and you will try harder to do better for all the new parents in your circle.
Boomers are obsessed with putting socks and hats on babies. Sometimes it’s crazy. But sometimes they’re right: The baby is waking up at 3am because she’s chilly. Layer a onesie and socks under her pajamas.
It is you and your partner against the kids. Some days the baby wins, some days you win, but you and you partner cannot be turned against one another. You are on the same team. Any fight between 7pm and 7am doesn’t count.
“Parenting a toddler while pregnant” is exponentially harder than “parenting a toddler while caring for a newborn.” (The newborn’s needs are simple; the toddler wants to negotiate where Elmo sits at the dinner table.)
But alas, 1+1 does not equal 2. Most of the time, two kids is only 1.4 times harder than one kid — except for when things are going poorly, then two kids are one million times harder than one kid.There will be a moment in the middle of the night within the first two weeks of bringing each of your kids home from the hospital where you will turn to your husband and ask: “Did we just ruin our lives?”
The question is normal. The answer is no.Similarly, one day a few months in with each of your kids, you will learn over the baby in their crib and they will be so happy to see you that they will smile with their full body, kicking their feet inside their sleepsack and shaking like a dog wagging its tail.
You will wonder each time if the way this makes you feel is what taking heroin feels like.The way you will love your kids will feel immeasurably large. It is unimaginable that other people love their kids this much; that they too think their kids are pure magic. You will wonder: How could every other parent feel like this and still manage to go about their day like normal? The combination of adoration and anxiety is all-consuming. It will not dissipate, but rather, your sense of self will expand to make room for it.
As much as you love being a parent, you will somehow love seeing your husband become a parent more. He will change every diaper, wash every bottle, and won’t bat an eye when at three weeks postpartum, you have a mental breakdown at 3am because you stepped on a pile of dog food trying to warm up a bottle and the feeling of kibble under your feet was just too fucking much to deal with.
The women you know who find motherhood hard have many different reasons, but many of them seem to share the experience of a shitty husband. You can’t relate.You have spent the better part of the last decade worried that getting married and having kids will make your career and your big dreams impossible. (You even told
as much for her book on the rise of single women.)
A screenshot I found on my phone from literally 10 years ago today, when Rebecca’s book was excerpted in a magazine. Whoops! You will be wrong. Don’t worry so much.
I left out a lot of stuff there — but for now, that’s enough. Let me know what else pre-baby me (or pre-baby you!) should have known.
Two hot romance novels this week, because the world is bad:
Deep End by Ali Hazelwood: A competitive collegiate diver and an all-star college swimmer get into a sort-of secret relationship with some intro-level BDSM stuff. This is very hot and very classically Ali Hazelwood (even if some of the plot mechanics are a little eye-rolling.)
First Time Caller by B.K. Borison: A Sleepless in Seattle-esque story about Aiden Valentine, a jaded romance hotline radio host who gets a call from a young girl looking for romantic help for Lucie, her single mom. The interview goes viral, the show becomes about Lucie’s search for love, and whoops, turns out maybe she doesn’t have to look much further than across the DJ booth. I loved this — one of my favorites of the year so far. So warm-hearted and steamy.
Other reading recs:
How to sane *and* informed in this era: Reclaim the edge of your media diet. [Links I Would Gchat You.]
I always knew I wanted to have kids — and yet, I cannot get enough of reading about people who aren’t quite sure about it. I’ve read books, watched so many TikToks, and now this, which is a good summation. [The Purgatory of Being a Fence-Sitter in Elle]
A deep dive into r/Waiting to Wed, a subreddit where mostly women ask for help getting their partners to propose. [The Sociology of Begging Someone to Marry You.]
I’m trying not to do politics here, but I’ve found myself using the term “soy right” a half-dozen times this week, so you must read this. [Soy Right ascendent by Max Read.]
In the book I will be announcing next week, I write at length about the demise of institutions and traditional career paths, and the impact that has had on gen Z & millennials’ ambitions and leadership. This hits. [Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress.]
How the internet impacts the English language. [‘Because Internet’]
What a beautiful essay! Thank you for sharing! ❤️
So much of this brings me back 18 year Amanda! And some of it feels as true parenting teens as it did parenting newborns ❤️