Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
If you are planning this pregnancy, or even if you have some flexibility after becoming pregnant, make a Baby Sized Hole in your life. You will have to make this hole after you have the baby; if you do it early, you might get to have a little more choice in what survives the paring down of your pre-baby life.
Most people spend about a third of the day (24 hour day) sleeping and a third of the day working, and the remaining third is crammed with attending to all other needs and wants. Whatever one has as a day off or weekend is additionally crammed with all the things one gets behind on day to day. Where will caring for a baby fit into this constrained space?
Hopefully, more than one of you will share the work of caring for this baby. Get as much additional help as you can, from friends, extended family, and hired, especially during the first few weeks. You might think you want some time to yourself to figure out how you want to be a parent, but you still need the help, so get people who aren't going to help you with the parenting part, but can clean the bathroom or pick up groceries or cook for you. Post-partum doulas will do all of this, and will care for you, and may be able to help you find other assistance as well.
Julie Shields, in the appallingly titled How to Avoid the Mommy Trap and Susan Maushart in The Mask of Motherhood both describe painful transitions to motherhood in particular and parenting in general. They also both describe (Shields in useful detail; Maushart in passing) an equalitarian solution for couples in which both parents have paid employment: two thirty-hour a week jobs and about thirty hours of child care, carefully juggled, can allow both parents to bond with the baby, maintain a foothold in the job market and hopefully not fall too far behind in their career and definitely get some time with other adults, and maintain a relationship with each other. Parents forced to work opposite shifts to cover child care will inevitably suffer; this is truly a tragedy when it occurs. If you see it happening with friends, please do all you can to assist. They can use help, as much as you have to offer.
But implementing such a solution usually requires some time; it's generally easier to find time for creating such an arrangement before the baby arrives, rather than after.
It is easy, before the baby arrives, to imagine that one will continue to go out to eat with friends, go to parties, travel, and so forth, either with the baby, or leaving the baby with child care or one's spouse. This might even work out. But generally, if we want to connect with our baby, the time not already committed to work or other basic needs is too short already. And breastfeeding is perhaps the ultimate, interrupt-driven lifestyle. You may be able to do a lot bringing your baby with you, by wearing your baby, sleeping with your baby, and having your baby share your schedule. But you might get a baby that finds your life a little too stimulating. Waiting until the baby arrives will allow you to find out, post-baby, what matters most to you. It will also allow you the chance to find out what your baby (and this will change over time) will and will not tolerate with equanimity. Nevertheless, you might want to get any ongoing activities, hobbies and other commitments you had pre-baby into a steady, ignorable state before the baby, so that you can resume them at your new family's convenience.
Books about caring for newborns and dealing with the immediate post-partum state emphasize turning off the ringer on the phone and putting a message on the machine explaining that you won't be getting back to anyone for a little while, they are serious. And that message will be acceptable to the vast majority of people who, after all, are generally aware that new babies are time-consuming. But they'll be a lot happier if they already knew not to rely upon you. And when they do see you again, their joy in your happiness will be unalloyed with irritation at having to deal with the fallout that your disappearance caused.
Some years earlier, I had reduced my housekeeping standards. The classic book on breastfeeding, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding annoyed me in part because their idea of lowered standards is still higher than mine. What household chores do get done, get done as they go along. The laundry basket is in the bathroom with the laundry. Dirty dishes go into the dishwasher immediately. I clean as I go when I cook. I view vacuuming as a quarterly chore. (Now that I have a kid starting to crawl, I have to keep it cleaner because of what might otherwise wind up in his mouth.) I'm a good, fast cook, and I know how to stock the kitchen so we can eat out of it for a week without multiple store runs. I know how to cook for one person or for many, and I know what freezes.
Then I found out that between recovering from a C-section and caring for a new baby, getting to the store to go grocery shopping was tricky. However much you pare down and prepare, the potential for surprises will remain.
We had planned, some months earlier, to visit the east coast to visit my husband's relatives when the baby was about three months old. I thought that was a conservative amount of time to adapt to new parenthood. But our baby was two weeks late; that plus a c-section meant we were only just organized to actually travel.
I had wanted to start exercising after eight weeks. With the anemia, that was just barely possible.
I had wanted to start martial arts at about three months. I was very uncertain about this goal, and had more or less abandoned it, since I did not know how recovered I would be. In the event, at about three months, my instructor was available, and I had child care. I was extraordinarily lucky that child care worked out; had the provider been incompatible with my baby, I would have had to delay indefinitely, until I found a provider I and my baby were happy with.
We had planned to spend a week in the mountains after Christmas, when Teddy was a little over four months old. We were able to do this, but by then, I realized that even cross country skiing was going to be tricky with such a small baby. We had arranged to bring child care with us, but he got sick and was unable to come. We spent a lot of time indoors (which was just fine; the view was gorgeous).
With a lot of assistance from friends, family and some paid helpers (child care and a post partum doula), we were able to survive, figure out how to get some sleep and start getting some exercise. But there was a bigger problem, that I have so far failed in finding a book about: solving problems as a family.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created February 5, 2006 Updated March 8, 2006