Dear friend!
I am SO TREMENDOUSLY excited for you. Becoming a mom is an amazing experience, a joy I can’t articulate. Motherhood is the greatest blessing I have literally ever experienced in my entire life. It has been so hard (especially the beginning) and the most challenging thing I have ever experienced too. I feel like becoming a mom deepens your love, your heart, your walk with Jesus in ways you can’t even imagine. I was in the process of collecting my thoughts about everything and wanted to send you some encouragement and wisdom. Totally take it or leave it – just wanted to share with you and literally zero.pressure.at.all. My sister-in-law sent me something similar when I was pregnant and it was really encouraging to me.
Please please please reach out to me any time. I want to be available to encourage you, pray for you, answer any weirdly specific questions you may have even if you think they are gross, and just be able to tell you you aren’t alone and that you’re gonna make it. I have two other friends who had babies the same month I did and I texted them all the time. It made a big difference for my heart and my sanity 🙂
N E W B O R N L I F E : The good, the bad, and the ugly, and the joy
I really struggled with the first month/six weeks of motherhood. It was honestly so hard, I couldn’t even believe it. Kinda felt like falling over a cliff (“how come no one told me this would be this hard”). My postpartum hormones were so bad I was crying at everything while trying to recover from a difficult delivery AND I was so sleep deprived I thought I was going to die. I remember crying even while we were still in the hospital that I would never sleep again, and Corbin reassuring me that we would get through it. My family kept me from going over the edge into legit postpartum depression and anxiety. There were panic attacks and sob sessions. I talked to Jesus and cried a lot in the shower.
BUT
You may have a wonderful experience! I don’t want you to think that the newborn days are awful – it wasn’t my favorite stage, but it could be yours! It’s overwhelming how this new little person is yours, but what a gift it is. I look at my daughter every day and cannot believe she is mine. Those initial days are a blur, but there was much beauty and joy in the midst of it – cuddling my tiny person, changing her diapers with love and care, and holding her and holding her and holding her while I looked at her sweet face and touched all her fingers and toes. Honestly, a lot of the hard stuff for me was just functioning on two hours of sleep which made the rest of life feel like I was insane. I also have a tiny apartment, so the claustrophobia was real. But guess what? We made it. We’re doing great. I leaned hard on my village. God provided strength to get through the hardest parts and the easy parts too. I feel a heckuva lot more competent now. It just took time.
Even when you’re exhausted, keep thanking God and praising Him for this little image bearer. Pray a lot with your husband. Pray over your baby. Sing along to hymns. Treasure the tiny stage. Record your thoughts on your phone at 2am when you’re nursing so you can look back and see God’s goodness.
RECS – okay, here is my random collection of thoughts, advice, wisdom, encouragement, potpourri from my mom brain.
-Do. What. Works. For. Your. Family. Every single person will have advice or “this is what I did,” but at the end of the day you and your husband are the ones who get to make the decisions on what to do for you. Whether that’s pacifiers, how long do we swaddle for, bottle feeding, WHATEVER. Pray, seek wisdom, and then you guys get to decide. And do what you gotta do!
-If there is any possible way for your mom/mother-in-law/aunt/sister/SOMEONE to come stay with you, or come over each day for a while, do it. My mom was there for me the first several days and it was life saving to have a third person who was calm, well rested, and experienced with tiny babies. Corbin and I felt like chickens with our heads cut off. It was my mom who gave me respite to go nap, encouraged me, helped me remember what we were told in the hospital about certain things, washing bottles, showing Corbin what to do for certain things, and making me eat and drink water. She even walked us through Evie’s first bath.
-Breastfeeding: okay, some women love it and have a wonderful experience. Some women hate it. Some women fall in the middle. For some, it just doesn’t work out, and please please hear this: IT’S OKAY. Your motherhood, your identity in Christ, your worth, is NOT DEFINED by your ability to breastfeed. Sounds silly, but I struggled with feeling guilty about supplementing with formula. But my milk took a while to fully come in, and even then I’ve never quite produced enough for Evie to be full. Even as I write this, we are doing about 60/40 formula and breast milk because she is a hungry peeper. Your mental health is not worth sacrificing on some made-up altar of being a supermom. A fed baby is a healthy baby!
-Also on breastfeeding: meet with a lactation consultant – for sure in the hospital, and definitely if needed after you come home. I was having spasms from nursing and needed help figuring out a good latch with Evie. I was able to get measured for the right flange size on my pump and it reduced my pain/discomfort completely. Turns out most women have no idea what their flange size is and it’s usually way smaller than the ones you get with your pump! There is some initial discomfort when nursing as your body gets used to it, but DON’T LIVE IN PAIN.
-Be flexible and try to relax! There will totally be things that pre-baby, you thought “yeah, I’ll never do that” but then you end up needing to. Or, you have this super strict schedule in mind, and then Baby throws it out the window. Relax and let go, and go with the flow – it will make life so much easier vs. trying to death grip what you wanted to try and do. Babies have a way to making us flex hard 🙂 Pacifiers, for example – everything I read about breastfeeding was that you shouldn’t give babies pacifiers for the first month so they don’t struggle with nursing and I was determined NOT to giver her one…lol we gave Evie a pacifier in the hospital to help her calm down. Same with bottle feeding…yeah, that went out the window when we needed to supplement with formula. And guess what, she is doing great and it was all totally fine and it worked well for us.
-Growth spurts, witching hours, colic, cluster feeding: just be aware of what these are but don’t let them scare you too much. Some of this may happen with your baby, some may not, but I promise you’re going to make it and it will all be fine!
-Put on your own life preserver first. By that, I mean that you need to drink water, go pee, and eat so you can take care of baby. You may need to put baby down for a couple minutes. Baby may cry for an extra minute while you go brush your teeth or take your meds or whatever. Baby will be okay, I promise! You can’t take care of baby if you don’t take minimal care of yourself.
–Dads: On that note…the hardest thing for Corbin at the beginning was feeling helpless. He wanted to be the best support and the best dad he could be, but since I was nursing and he had to go back to work pretty quickly, it was difficult to figure out what he could do since I was feeding baby overnight. I often didn’t even know and felt so overwhelmed I couldn’t delegate things (and I also didn’t know what the baby needed either at first!). He realized that the best thing he could do was love me well – and this translated into a lot of practical things. Hugging me, holding me while I cried, telling me we were going to be okay and reminding me that Jesus was with us, making sure I drank water, setting up my “nursing station” overnight with snacks and my airpods, cooking, chores, and taking the baby so I could shower or even nap (if he was home from work). He still quotes Sam from Lord of the Rings to me – “I can’t carry the ring, but I can carry you!” Maybe you’re not nursing and you’re doing formula right away, or Dad has more time off work to be available – that’s awesome, and Dad can get more involved more quickly! Whatever happened, this is a beautiful opportunity for your marriage to go even deeper. I felt like we bonded so much in the early days. A good question for Dad to ask you is, “How can I love you best right now?”
–Don’t fall into a pit on the Internet. I Googled way too much and gave myself weird anxiety. Ask other moms you trust, ask family, gather the collective wisdom from your “village,” or talk to the pediatrician instead. Google sparingly! And don’t go on Reddit…unless there is a very specific thing you’re maybe looking for. Even then, just be cautious. Most everything on there is negative and discouraging.
-Have something ready to go when you’re doing overnight nursing – a calming, encouraging playlist, the Bible (I finished my Bible in a year in record time, lol), a helpful podcast. Two songs I highly recommend that got me through hard nights are “Jesus, King of Angels” by Fernando Ortega and “The Night Song” by CityAlight.
-Everything does get better!!! Babies sleep more consistently, they develop personalities and interact more, and you do get a normal routine going! It takes a bit but I promise it does happen. I don’t thrive on chaos or lack of routine, and so the newborn days of “what is my life right now” where I cried because it took me five days to open the mail have gradually become more predictable days where I can actually do work, vacuum, and make a real meal for dinner. And play with my wonderful baby of course 🙂
I needed God to teach me that motherhood is not a task; it’s a relationship. It’s loving and getting to know this tiny person who depends on me and her dad for everything. It’s not a checklist; my daughter is not a checklist. She is a person, with her own will, needs, desires, and personality. It’s a strange phenomenon that you can be so intimately connected with another separate person, and yet not know them at all – that takes time, and it’s normal to feel like your baby is a stranger at first.
Your prayers may be short and desperate; your time with the Lord may undergo a radical change; you will rely on Jesus more than ever, and it may feel like your falling into a pit at times. He promises He is near, and He is the good shepherd who will lead you up and through it all.
Take heart, dear friend, and know that God is holding you the entire time. Sending love, prayers, hugs, and all my joy to you during this amazing time in your life.
