Dear Reader: It’s been a minute. When last I left you, I was days from my due date, and ready to meet the future love of my life. Spoiler alert: I met him. He’s great.

I’ve been meaning to write sooner. First I started a “fourth trimester” blog. To summarize that unfinished, messy 2,663-word treatise, which included my whole dang birthing story and will be retained for my own records: labor long; pain bad; DRUGS; “here is a baby, it’s yours”; “breast feeding shouldn’t hurt if the latch is right” and other lies that should be federal crimes; a weird game called “how many times can your therapist make you take the postpartum depression questionnaire”; crippling fear about tiny decisions; and everyone’s in love and no one is okay.

That fourth-trimester blog then morphed into a “six months into motherhood” update, also never completed. At a certain point I accepted that I would not be finishing this anytime soon because of who I am as a person, and contented myself with taking 1,000 words of iPhone notes about my first year as a mother, which I’m now attempting to cobble together into a cohesive article that is a step or two beyond “13 creative ways to complain about sleep.” But please know that it is mostly that.

Twelve months into motherhood, and I can confirm: I was made for this. And by ‘this’ I mean love and suffering.

Surprising no one, I love my baby very much. Before I had a baby, before I got married, I tried to imagine what it would feel like to love a child. I even asked around. I thought maybe it was just a matter of multiplication (the way I love my own mom, but … double? Triple?) It is not that. It doesn’t feel like I love him MORE. It feels like … oof. This is probably why no one else could explain it to me when I asked. It is not, at this point, that the love feels “big.” It’s that it feels essential. This love is actually quite calm and quiet. At the same time, it has seeped into my blood and changed me in subtle but fundamental ways. My child is in my heart always. He walks through the day with me even when he’s not with me. To be fair, he is rarely not with or near me, but whatever. He is part of my life force now; another limb, but far more interesting.

Also surprising no one, at least no parent, I have also suffered very much. There have been many times when I questioned whether I was mentally healthy enough to carry on with this huge responsibility. There will be many, many more. I have F-L-I-P-P-E-D out more times than even I suspected I would. And I suspected I would flip out MANY TIMES. It’s concerning. It’s draining. It feels like the opposite of the Strong Mama trope, and I *always* wish I could rewind the tape and just handle it in stride next time. I’m finding that it is rarely helpful to dissect why I snap when I do snap. It’s usually the baby equivalent of the couple who has a blowout fight about taking out the garbage. Most of the times I lost my mind were because the poor kid woke up early from a nap, or wouldn’t take one. Even as I write that it sounds absurd. Those naps will be an imperceptible pin prick on the map of his life. I’ve already mostly forgotten them. But at the time, they were all-consuming.  See “crippling fear about tiny decisions,” Fourth Trimester, 2020.

The Only Path Is Your Dumb Path

I have made a lot of, I won’t say “mistakes,” but “choices only a dumb first-time mom would make.” I have received helpful advice and ignored it. I have made “game plans” and done the opposite. Possibly worst of all, I’ve looked to the Internet for advice. I know now that all the mistakes and meandering is the correct path, because it’s the only path. And it’s the only path because of this one unalienable truth: you can’t tell a mother a damn thing. You really can’t. At least not about almost anything that matters to her, and definitely not about the Big Three: birthing, feeding, or sleep. I didn’t realize that until I was in the thick of it myself, but it really explains a lot.

For example, so many friends painstakingly explained to me that Unmedicated Labor Is Dumb™ and that I should not hesitate to get an epidural. In every way, epidurals were invented for people like me. I hate being in pain ever, and have absolutely no qualms about taking medication when I need it. I do not think of myself as robust or hardy. I am not preoccupied by small statistical risks. But I would not accept my fate. that unmedicated labor was not for me, until I was 19 hours into the absolutely bananas experience, at which point I was finally admitted to the hospital and would have been happy to stick the epidural needle into my own spine if it came to that. Now I would be that friend saying “just get the epidural.” Except that I know that it’s pointless to tell a mother anything.

Sleep is another key instance where you probably know what you need to do, other people know what you need to do, your pediatrician knows what you need to do, Jesus knows what you need to do, even the Internet knows what you need to do, and … you probably won’t do it. At least not right away. At risk of this truly turning into “13 creative ways to complain about sleep,” for my own journey, I will skip to the part where I attempted sleep training around 7-8 months out of pure desperation.

Here’s my thing about sleep training. I’m glad I did it. It worked. It also nearly destroyed me. It is not for everyone (including me, technically), but it was what the situation demanded. What I wish in hindsight is that people who had successfully sleep trained their baby explained it better, so I would have been more prepared for straight-up psychological warfare. And by “better,” I mean “in excruciating, almost embarrassing, detail.”

For instance, do not say: “It’s tough, but if you stick to it, your baby could be sleeping through the night and putting themselves to sleep for naps in 3 days to a week.”

Instead, say something like:

Day 1: The crying. My god, the crying. It is the wail of a babe that has never been loved. It is the scream of a small thing, abandoned at sea during a tempest, lost, lost, never to be found again. It is a shriek that could drain a mother’s soul from her body. The crying. Anything to stop the crying.

Day 2: Going a little better today! Think he’s starting to get the hang of it!

Day 3: HE IS NOT GETTING THE HANG OF IT. ABORT! ABORT! HOLD HIM FOR NAPS UNTIL HE’S 30!

Day 4: Took 1.5 hours to put him down for a 1 hour nap. Cried for most of it. Joined a cult. Agreed to burn down an orchard for a lesser-known sleep god.

Day 5: Wait no, maybe he IS getting the hang of it?

Day 6: Going a little better today!

Day 7: He’s sleeping. My God (er, sleep god), he’s sleeping!! #sleepgoals #sleeptrainingconvert #sleeptrainngworkedforme #itstoughbutifyousticktoityourbabycouldbesleepingthroughthenight

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

Conditioning

Another aspect of motherhood that I thought endlessly about while contemplating kids was whether I’d have the energy for it. Pre-baby, I was burned out by normal life, and my normal life was nothing wild. After an hour of playing with my niece and nephews, I was tired to the bone, and felt relieved that I could then go home to a zero-kid environment. What do you do when that kid is yours and also never leaves?? I asked my sister how she had the energy, and she said something like: I don’t know. You just do it and it comes.

After watching the documentary Cheer on Netflix this spring, I realize it’s all about conditioning. Full-day baby care is like doing the cheer routine full-out when you’re already exhausted from practicing your pyramid for 2 hours. Minus Jerry. I could sure use a Jerry.

I was so tired for many months, and even after M started sleeping well, I still thought my body would never recover. But it did. I get the energy for playing through playing. Call it Mom Reps. And pretty much every day is a PR.

Kindness

It feels strange to be wrapping up this blog having said so little about nursing, the thing that took up so much of my life for 10 months, and the thing that broke my heart to stop early. I suppose it’s a good example of how quickly emotions can change in parenthood, and how much of a child’s growth and development is a simultaneous gain and loss for the parent. I don’t want to write about nursing because I strangely don’t care anymore. Nursing was incredibly hard and occasionally wonderful. It was convenient, and inconvenient, and blessedly free. I struggled extremely to accept that we couldn’t make it to the magical 12-month mark. And now I wouldn’t go back to nursing for even one more month if you paid me!

If I could take a lesson or two away from that experience – and from the entire first year – to carry forward into the coming years of mothering, it would be: be kinder to yourself, and this too shall pass. Instead of being frustrated with my body toward the end of nursing, I should have been thanking it daily for everything it has done for me, and mainly for giving me my abs back.

I’m sure I won’t follow these lessons, not always or even often. You really can’t tell a mother anything.