Things are not going according to plan: Why it’s impossible to prepare for motherhood
The theme of maternity is inexhaustible. It seems that talking about how life changes with the advent of a child, about the feelings and experiences of young parents and the difficulties that they face can be really long. The heroine of our material about young parents, Vika Boyarskaya, told us how she prepared for motherhood and how her expectations turned out.
I never loved playing mothers and daughters. Swaddling dolls and riding them in a stroller was for me a completely incomprehensible and boring game. It was interesting to sew an outfit from a piece of curtains or a Christmas ball crushed in a mortar, then to mix it with glue and smudge it on the wall - I really wanted to repeat the effect of shimmering prickly coating in my room, like in the lobby of the Palace of Pioneers. But I absolutely didn’t like to nurture plastic pups.
When I had a younger sister, I just went to first grade. And I also failed to play mothers with her. I don’t know if the reason lies in the heap of new impressions from the school, where I really wanted to go as soon as possible, or that the parents for some reason diligently barred me from participating in the mess with the baby, but the fact remains: how they behave newborns and what should be done with them in general, I did not remember anything and did not have any practical or even theoretical ideas. The situation remained so smooth until a positive blood test for HCG. If you do not know, then more often for a woman, this means a pregnancy that has just begun.
Until you yourself become a parent, you cannot understand how it is. But I really want to understand and at least partially anticipate. Especially when the stomach is already so big that even XL-sized T-shirts stop bothering him. Even those borrowed from the future happy father, who, it seems, also does not really understand what will happen next: you both agree on what you have seen in the vicinity of cardboard babies near the department with diapers in the supermarket.
On the one hand, starting to dive into the world of expectations, it is very easy to fall into the trap woven from wondrous photographs from other people's facebook and instagrams, where mom, dad and pretty cheeky baby in a white T-shirt (or better two!) Have a sweet breakfast at a common table in a filled sun huge kitchen. Light furniture in the Scandinavian style, mom has already managed to meditate, practice yoga in the morning, dad looks at her with undisguised tenderness, baby, that is, two kids are carefully studying the letters of the English alphabet, because they learned Russian letters when they were not yet . Of course, you do not think that everything will be exactly the same with you. In the end, you will not have a Scandinavian kitchen, and a living room in the style of a loft. And you will not be doing yoga in the morning, just do not give up your painting classes and, of course, you will have time to work.
On the other hand - and so it was with me - you can build an alternate reality in your head: there, barely having given birth, you are immersed in a dark postpartum depression; the child refuses to eat, sleep, you don’t know what to do with him, his father doesn’t know what to do with him, you are the most useless parents in the world, and in general everything-everything-everything goes wrong! Perhaps you too often heard from your parents what a difficult child they were: “I put the best years on you,” “With your appearance, my life is over,” “I didn’t see the light of white while you were growing” and so on. Maybe the first months of motherhood are great for your sister or girlfriend, and she somehow in a fit of weakness complained to you of her despair, and this picture is imprinted firmly in your memory. Or maybe you're just such a person: always expect that something will go wrong, and therefore hold your hands on the pre-designed plan even more tightly.
Instincts and hormones do amazing things with pregnant women. One may assert that pregnancy does not change you and you are not going to give up your normal way of life, at least until the moment you are somehow pulled out of your child in the maternity hospital, but in the eighth month you can safely wake up in the morning and realize that urgently, immediately, right now to paint the walls, rearrange the furniture, run to the store and buy a stroller, cot, a pile of sliders and ten kinds of feeding bottles. I was covered with the nesting instinct much earlier. My pregnancy was planned and desired, so I started preparatory activities from the very beginning. And at that very moment I realized that I couldn’t imagine at all what it was: to get at my own disposal a newly born person. I decided to do as Hermione — that is, read all the textbooks before the start of the school year. And ordered on the "Ozone" three dozen books from the category of "parenting".
And then the strange began. These books are quite contradictory. While I was plunging into a thick folio of hippai Sears, who offered to sleep with a child together and breastfeed for as long as possible, my husband read “French children do not spit food,” and said that we would teach the baby to sleep, eat right manners and good manners from the first day of life. We exchanged books, and from the work of Pamela Drukerman, I concluded that a mother, whose child cannot sleep all night by three months, automatically turns into a gargoyle covered with spikes and plunges into the depths of postpartum depression. And also - that she clearly does not consider the book of Sears as her desktop.
With each new book came a new theory. Children need freedom, because only freedom will make them full-fledged individuals. Children need to be punished, because only punishments help build boundaries. Be softer for the child to trust you. Be hard so the child feels that you are in control. In an attempt to somehow break through all this abyss, I began to google and realized that the situation on the Internet is even more like a fierce military confrontation. For every breastfeeding mother before school, on every forum or community on Facebook, there will be another mother who asserts that formula-fed babies are calmer, sleep better, develop faster and more easily learn to be independent. For each supporter of early development, there is his opponent, confident that it irreversibly shakes the child’s psyche.
Especially vulnerable in this situation feel neophytes-Hermione like me. I barely visited the first ultrasound, but I already began to plan how we will organize the dream of our unborn child. For some reason, the dream (or rather, its future absence) seemed to me the most difficult of the upcoming tests. Perhaps the reason is that I regularly heard from my own mother how difficult “sleepless” child was in childhood. Two recently-born girlfriends poured oil on the fire, endlessly discussing the regime between themselves, the duration of dreams, their number and other eternal questions from the category of "whether to put it in your bed or immediately teach you to have a separate bed?".
I was waiting for the worst. It was tuned to the fact that sleep in our family will not be at all. No one. She studied a million guides on how to survive in this case, and even frustrated the lecturer in courses for pregnant women. It just seemed to me, with my huge round belly, that it was very important to discuss my theories with her, a child care consultant and a large mother. She agitated the group solely for joint sleep, and I quoted her the last three books I read, completely contradictory, but for some reason I did not meet with understanding! However, I listened to one of her advice already then (thank God!). All the last months of pregnancy I went to bed at every opportunity. When night sleeplessness began, I slept during the day, because I was sure that with the birth of my child my peace and sleep would go away if not forever, then very, very long.
Needless to say, having studied a million books, one hundred and fifty forums and dozens of communities on Facebook, I myself, not having given birth, was ready to advise everyone around on any children's issue? I had my own opinion, supported by dozens of evidence from books; I knew exactly what would happen from the moment when my contractions begin, until my daughter comes of age. I was sure that I could make predictions for 18 years ahead: how, how much and in what posture I will give birth, what and when to feed, what vaccinations to do, what languages to teach, what political views to broadcast and so on.
Probably, you already know what happened next. When the daughter was born, she slept without a break for about twelve hours. All this time, there was a dad next to her, because my birth ended up with an emergency caesarean section: the pathology due to which this happened cannot be seen on the ultrasound. The baby was in perfect order, and I, after spending the night in intensive care, went crazy, because everything was not going according to plan - because I had to urgently start raising her, as it was written in the books, so as not to miss something. However, by the time when they brought me in a wheelchair to the ward where my husband and daughter were waiting, I had already thought of a new plan of action, taking into account the sudden hit in intensive care.
And then I saw her. She slept, sucking her own finger. Her cheeks were scratched, because her nails were very long (I still do not understand why it was not written in any book about this!). And I understood that I did not know anything at all. I don’t know how to take her in my arms, so small and fragile, I don’t know whether to wake her up now or wait until she wakes up by herself. The voices of all the book authors, as well as the voice of my own mother, who asserts that all the children in the world do not sleep well, suddenly ceased to exist in my head.
Twelve months have passed since then, but they are still silent in an amazing way. My daughter slept well the first few months. And somebody else’s children didn’t sleep at all. We could not teach her to sleep separately, and she still needs me to be there all night. And someone else successfully copes with this task as early as three months, and his or her mother certainly does not feel at all like a gargoyle covered with spikes.
The truth is, I don't feel that way either.
