What’s the best piece of newborn advice you ever received? Mine came at the perfect time of my motherhood journey and completely changed my perspective, for the better.
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I don’t remember the exact timeline of it (does time make any sense when you have a newborn?!), but I vividly remember being told one thing after having a baby that stopped me in my tracks and helped immensely on my motherhood journey.
I was 40 at the time, but hadn’t had a huge amount of experience with newborns, apart from holding my friends’ babies or trying to run errands for them their worlds had got flipped on their heads. I did have a stepson, who I had first met when he was three – but boy, a toddler, as i was about to understand, is a very different kettle of fish to a newborn.
As many new parents could relate I’m sure, it was at times overwhelming and terrifying. I felt so much love for this new little person who I had so desperately wanted, but I was also so afraid of doing something wrong. The fact that I also had postpartum thyroiditis, which causes heart palpitations, anxiety and sleeplessness (basically, it mimics Post Partum Anxiety – joy!), certainly didn’t help my stress levels. I would spend my nights afraid to fall asleep, and then my days – in some sort of zombie trance – trying to be the perfect new mum.
My internet algorithms (particularly the gram) had totally worked out I had a newborn, and I was being fed pieces of parenting advice left, right and centre. Wake windows seemed to be a massive thing that was filling my IG feed, so I did my best to try and understand them, and implement them. Except… my son had other ideas about what his sleep schedule should look like: mainly, that he just shouldn’t have one at all. So, of course, I fretted that I was doing it all wrong – but all the while tried to keep a façade that everything was great!! I was fine! Motherhood was all good!! Thankfully it was at this point that I got onto medication for my thyroid, but it was still taking its darn time to reduce my anxiety.
Which is about when, I got this one piece of advice that totally changed things.
My father-in-law came for a visit – he was calmly holding the baby, having a cuppa and talking about things related to the baby, but also the rest of the world outside of our bubble, which was great to also talk about (yay! The rest of the world still existed).
Then, he looked at the time and asked something about how the baby was sleeping or when he might next be due for a nap or something that wasn’t too confronting about the topic.
It was then that I said – in what I felt was a nice even tone, but in reality was probably not at all – that he was supposed to be asleep right that moment, but he didn’t seem to want to sleep when he was supposed to. I told him I was trying to do the whole awake windows thing that is in all the books and on the internet, and follow this guideline, but it wasn’t really working too well.
And then he said:
“Oh, the thing is Alice, he hasn’t read the manual,” he said.
It stopped me in my tracks.
It was such a simple thing to say, but so… liberating?
Sure, in an ideal world there is a textbook way that a baby might behave, but in reality, just like adults, babies are all a little different to another.
I text a friend who had a baby before I did and asked, “Hey, did you do wake windows?”
And she replied: “Hahahahaha”
Another friend told me how well her firstborn slept, but then her second – for whom she didn’t do anything differently for – was quite the opposite.
So much of it is completely out of your hands and realizing this, made my journey so much easier. Since those days, I haven’t kept a strict schedule – and although things weren’t always easy – my little boy is now a good sleeper and an all-round A+, wonderful little being.