If I Could Have Done One Thing Differently in the Newborn Days, It Would Have Been This
I could have saved myself a lot of anxiety.
I felt silly for doing it, but I couldn’t stop myself any longer. During a midnight nursing session, struggling to stay awake and fighting the dread I felt for the day to come, I pulled out my phone and typed in the search bar.
“What are you supposed to do with a newborn all day?”
They didn’t cover this at the hospital. Oh, they went over car seat protocol and safe sleep practices and what to do if the baby runs a fever. They reminded me to take my pain meds and drink a lot of water and hold the baby like a football while breastfeeding (which I never did, because it felt ridiculous and uncomfortable, and also I hate football).
But they didn’t tell me what I was supposed to do with myself — or the baby — in between the frequent feedings and diaper changes and desperately trying to get some sleep.
In the first few blurry days, filling spare time was the last thing on my mind. I was just trying to keep my little scrap of humanity alive — and myself, for that matter. My son’s post-birth weight loss and my own dangerous levels of sleep deprivation made for a scary, weepy, hallucinatory few days. The “new baby smell” wasn’t…
