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Is there life after baby?

Parenting
 Photo; Courtesy

Once a couple gets a child, they should not expect too much of themselves during these first, peculiar days. The three, father, mother and baby have a lot of adapting to do. The feelings and behavior of today have very little to do with next month as by then all three will have changed.

The baby will have settled into life outside the womb, and both parents will have settled into parenthood. This is an intensely emotional and confusing time.

Everything comes through as too much: stitches and pleasure, responsibility and pride, selfishness and selflessness. The mother is still very tired; her hormone balance is disturbed, her milk is not fully in and her body is crying for equilibrium.

Although the father has no direct physical effects on the mother, he has an emotional tightrope to walk.

He has to concede to the mother the prime role as the one who labored yet he has to make her feel that the child belongs to both of them, that he too is deeply involved. If he pays too much attention to the baby, he risks making his partner feel she is no longer his central person. If he concentrates on her he risks the charge that he does not care for his newborn.

The baby has to cope with a lot. While she was inside the womb, mother’s body took care of his. It provided baby’s food and oxygen, took away the waste products, kept baby warmly cushioned and protected. Now her body must take care of itself. She must suck and swallow food and water, digest it an excrete it’s wastes.

She must use energy from that food to keep her body functions running, to keep herself warm and to go on growing. While accepting all these new duties she must also cope with a positive bombardment of stimuli as the world rushes in on her. Suddenly there is air on her skin, there is warmth and coolness, there are textures, movements an restrictions.

There is hunger and emptiness, sucking, fullness and burping. There are sounds, smells and tastes. Everything is new. Everything is different. All is bewildering.

Her behavior is a series of reactions to what she perceives as random stimuli. She has instincts and reflexes and working senses but she has no knowledge and no experience. She is programmed to pay attention to you, to look at your faces and listen to your voices. She is programmed to suck when you offer the nipple.

While she remains a newborn, her behavior will be random and unpredictable. She may cry for no reason that you can discover and stop as suddenly an inexplicably as she began.

When you start looking after this small, new human being, you lack that first essential for watchful care: baselines. However much you know about babies in general, neither you nor anyone else knows anything about this one in particular. You don’t know how she looks and behaves when she is well and happy so it’s difficult for you to know when she is ill or miserable.

 

You don’t know how much she “usually” cries because she has not been around for long enough for anything to be usual. So there is no easy way of knowing how much she usually eats or sleeps so you can’t judge whether today’s feeding or sleeping is adequate or excessive. Yet her well-being is in your hands.

But don’t worry, even without baselines of usual behavior against which to judge, you have to make continual assessment and adjustments while you learn your baby and she learns life. There is a lot of learning for all of you. It may take only a week after her birth for you to feel secure in your caring and for her to feel secure in her world.

But it may take a month. Once you and her have learned the basic essentials, established your baselines, got to know each other, everything will suddenly seem much easier and smoother for all of you. You will be dealing with a baby person rather than a newborn.

 

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