Diary of a Second Time Mum - Breaking All of My "First Time Mum" Rules

8th July - 2 weeks old

Dear Diary

Sitting here feeding (yet again!) contemplating the past two weeks with the new man in our lives, I realised how calm, relaxed and laidback I've been this time round. This reflection also got me thinking about the strict and stringent rules that I had set for myself as a first time mother and how completely ridiculous they were. Also how those rules had no bearing over how my daughter is today.

I can proudly say that 2 weeks in, I have already rebelled and broken the following rules:

• My child will not have a dummy (I requested one be brought to the hospital on the second day after the first night was spent sleepless with an unsettled baby. And wouldn't you know it, he wouldn't take it. But having it there as back up was reassuring in a way)
• My child will be breastfed, not formula fed (This one went out the window on our first night at home. He wouldn't settle and seemed to be hungry no matter how much I fed. So I cracked open the tin of formula I'd bought before he was born, mixed up a bottle, and wouldn't you know it ...... he wouldn't take it! Again it was reassuring to know that I had another option)
• My child will sleep in its own cot/bassinette (This rule was broken I think on the 3rd or 4th night home. Little Mister loves to be held and it's been awfully cold. There's something wonderful and cosy about snuggling close with your baby that I missed out on with my daughter, seeing as though she spent her first few months in the brace correcting her hips. I have been sleeping half sitting up to make sure he's safe. His favourite place in the world is snuggled into  my chest between my boobs like a little koala bear :)
• My child will wear cloth nappies (This time around I knew disposables are the way to go. During the newborn phase who really has time to wash pooey nappies! I do have a confession to make though ... during the crazy "get everything ready because baby is coming soon" stage, I did diligently wash all the cloth nappies and stack them neatly in the cupboard. A couple of days later I came to my senses and realised I was off in some fantasy world and immediately packed them all back into the garage. Maybe some day .....) 

It feels good to know that I can be flexible and adaptable adjusting to the circumstances as they arise, rather than being imprisoned by the notion of right and wrong. If I've learned anything, it's that there is  no right or wrong, there just is.

Some days you just need to do whatever you can to get through the day and if that means spending the day in your pj's on the couch giving your little one snuggles because that's what they need in that moment, well that's what's happening that day. The housework can wait. The dishes can wait. The outside world can wait. Because right now I am really enjoying getting to know this new little man we've been blessed with and I'm sure soon enough there'll be time to tend to life's other menial tasks!

Until next we meet.

Sending love

Shanelle

xxx

Silent Screaming

As the weeks wore on, my feelings about myself and motherhood weren’t getting any better. I loved my baby, yet I didn't love me and how I felt. Constant anxiousness, racing heart, tight chest and shallow breathing were my new friends. I felt like I was drowning. I felt so out of control that I had to control everything I could.

When I was feeding our baby girl, her feeds were timed. Ten minutes on each breast, I recall being the magic number and the rule I had. I hated feeding. It was so uncomfortable. I hated not being able to move and hated even more those moments when I needed to go to the toilet but was in the middle of a feed and not able to take her off the breast knowing all hell would break loose if I did. So I carried on, hating it.

I wondered what was wrong with me. I didn’t get the warm and fuzzy feeling that I’d heard many mums talk about when they were feeding their babies. I felt so relied upon all the time and that scared the living daylights out of me.

There were days when I couldn’t shift the anxiety. I couldn’t bear to hear our girl cry. If I did, I would start too. There was so much sadness in my heart. My favourite hangout when she was sleeping was in the bottom of our walk-in robe with the door firmly closed. Enveloped in darkness, I felt safe. My external environment matched how I felt on the inside. I remember silently screaming. So many fears and emotions running rampant, I just couldn’t get them out. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t know what the consequences would be. And so they stayed inside me and the internal screaming continued to get louder and louder.

But the feeling in my chest just wouldn’t let up. I can clearly recall the day that I realised my world was falling apart. It was 7am in the morning and I’d already done 3 loads of washing, hung them on the line,  baked a chocolate cake, some monte carlos and had an apple pie on the way. It was as if I had a momentary out of body experience. From afar I saw myself doing what I was doing and said to myself, “This is freaking crazy! You are not okay and you need to talk to someone about this. It can’t be normal!”

It seemed like forever until it was 8.30am and I could ring the doctor’s surgery to make an appointment with my GP. Finally I got through.  The receptionist must have picked up that things were not good with me; she managed to get me in straight away. As I got off the phone, I felt relief. The tears were streaming down my face and the feeling of hopelessness and imperfection came bubbling up again. In my heart I knew I was doing the right thing for myself and for our baby girl.

Sitting in the room with the doctor, I managed to tell her what I had been going through. I felt safe with her and trusted her. Through the tears I managed to tell her my story, how I hated breastfeeding, how I felt like a failure and how I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. She turned to me and said, “If the mother is happy, then the baby is happy. If you being happy means stopping breastfeeding and moving to formula, then so be it”. It was really that clear cut and simple.

I was with her for a long time. I talked. I cried. I shared my pain. She just sat and listened and offered me tissue after tissue. She then looked at me and said, “I think you may have postnatal depression, with what you’ve experienced with the birth and everything else that you’ve gone through”. In a sense, there was relief. What I was going through was abnormal and yet again, I wasn’t alone. Now I had a label to add to the collection, and it definitely wasn’t Chanel.

Together we came up with a plan. Start weaning baby off the breast and get her onto formula. Then we could start to take care of me. She gave me options. Once baby was weaned I could go onto medication and see a psychologist. I was to see her every other week as well, so she could keep track of my progress. I left with a fistful of pamphlets about post-natal depression, it’s causes and it’s treatments to take home to share with my partner, phone numbers for Lifeline in case I needed someone else to talk to, phone numbers for playgroups because I needed to start mingling more with other mums and her own personal mobile.

As we left, that familiar sense of failure came back. I had felt so completely safe and trusting in the doctor’s office. Yet as soon as I was back in reality, I felt totally out of control. I had no idea how I was going to explain to my partner what was going on with me and what was happening in my head.

That night I had a discussion with my partner about my visit to the doctor. I had always struggled with knowing the “right” thing to say. When I was younger, I would spend hours having conversations in my head, just to ask my parents a simple question like “Could I go to the disco on Friday night”. Communicating my feelings to my partner was a huge risk and I was terrified of how it he would accept it.

I was able to tell him about our trip to the doctor and her recommendations. He told me there was nothing wrong with me; it was all in my head. Darn tooting right it was in my head!!! He wasn’t in favour of me going on medication, but said if that helped, then so be it. He agreed that the breastfeeding was upsetting me and wanted to become more involved in that side of things. I couldn’t help but feel that I had let him down too, that on some level I had failed his expectations of motherhood.

And I guess this is where it all fell down for me. I had the picture in my head of how it should be and what the right thing was and the wrong thing was. There was no room for someone to throw a spanner in the works and change the course of my pre-planned events. Over time I’ve learnt to loosen my grip on control and have learnt to go with the flow more. To just relax, take a deep breath and trust that things will work out the way they are meant to.

 

What's your story morning glory?

 The first few weeks of motherhood are just a blur when I look back. A constant cycle of feeding, nappy changes, bathing, changing, trying to get some sleep where I could. I can’t access any specific memories during that time. I remember feeling out of control, out of my depth and just taking things day by day. After all, I was still healing too. The time came for my partner to return to work and I guess it’s from there that the memories flow from. He worked long hours and I was often at home alone at night with our girl.

I remember it being quite lonely. Not being able to drive for those first 6 weeks was a real isolator. I was alone in a brand new home with a brand new baby to boot and no instruction manual to get me through. Thank goodness for the mid-wives popping in every couple of days for their checks and for my mum coming to take me to the shops when I needed it.  It was comforting to have people around me, but I didn’t know how to reach out and ask for help. I thought if I did, I would be seen as a failure, as the chick that couldn’t get this motherhood thing right. Because you either get it right or you don’t. There was no room for trial and error in my mind. So I pushed my feelings down and carried on.

There were so many rules that I’d made for myself and for our girl even before we’d even met her. I would breastfeed her. She would wear cloth nappies. She would sleep in her own bed. Our child would never have a dummy. I never had one and I managed to survive okay. When I think about these rules now, they weren’t really my rules at all. I had learned them from when my mum was a mum and she from her mum and so on, back through the generations it goes. The rules were rigid, structured and judgemental. Lacking flexibility and from generations where the woman became a stay-at-home-mum once she’d given birth. She was expected to raise the family and manage the domestic chores.

One day, I had our angel midwife from the hospital visiting me and my mum was there too. On this particular day and for a few days before, I’d been struggling to settle our baby. Every time I lay her down for a sleep, she would wake within a few minutes. It was driving me bonkers. The constant crying and no peace was sending my world into chaos. I didn’t know what to do. Nothing I did seem to work. I was exhausted from a lack of sleep. My hormones were out of control. Tears came without warning.

With the help of our angelic midwife, we discovered that our girl liked to sleep with her head slightly raised. Who knew what kind of discomfort she had with her brace on? That’s the other distressing thing with a newborn too. There’s no instruction manual and no real indication of when you’re doing the right thing for them and when you’re not. There’s also no praise nor validation for when you do get it right. Something I was very much used to in my line of work. I don’t know that I ever got used to that. I just felt like a failure.

It dawned on me one day that I was never going to be the “perfect mum”. You know the ones you see on the cover of magazines in a bikini just weeks after giving birth. Trim, taut and terrific. I was never going to look like that because I’d had my stomach cut open to even have my baby. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my Caesar scar for the longest time. It was a constant reminder of how I’d failed as a mother right from the get go. Man, I couldn’t even have a natural birth, so what hope did I have of being the “perfect mum”.

These were the demons I was constantly battling with. You’re probably reading this and may even be thinking, that story you were telling yourself is complete and utter bullshit. And sitting here now writing it, years later, I can say without doubt that it was a bullshit story. We create our reality each and every day, in every single moment. With everything that happens in our world, we have a choice, whether we are aware of it or not. We choose how we feel. We choose how we respond. We choose what we believe in. We don’t always make good choices and at times may not even be aware that choice exists.

Looking back now, I know I took the safe choice, the familiar choice, the I-am-so-used-to-beating-myself-up-about-what-it-is-that-I-can’t-do choice that I don’t have it within me to see any positives in the situation. I wasn’t even aware at the time that if I’d not had the emergency c-section, I wouldn’t be here to share my story and most definitely wouldn’t be blessed with sharing my days with my beautiful, intelligent, inspiring and often challenging 4 year-old daughter. This is something I am now grateful and appreciative for every single day when I wake up and greet the world. I am truly thankful.