Brown mama confidence: my first week with my first baby

Today my beautiful son is a week old in the air-breathing world. I am a week old as a mother. My partner as a father, our parents as grandparents, our siblings as Aunts and Uncles and so on. It’s a new adventure for so many of us! Particularly for my partner, me and my mother who are living together during this time ❤ Dream team at baby’s service!

I could write several books just on the experiences, insights, feelings and learnings of this one week alone. It’s been by far the most meaningful experience of my life. I have so much inside of me wanting to spill out and not enough time to experience it all, let alone document it all. But I had to write a fraction of it down, before I forget, before I fill my increasingly sleep-deprived memory with clichés instead of the realities of what actually happened and was experienced. So in this blog-post you’ll find my record at one week of just a few of the main things I have learnt. I title it Brown Mama Confidence because for me this journey is about building confidence as a mother.

---

Insight #1: People who aren’t parents have very little actual idea what it’s like; don’t mind them

I don’t mean this in a mean way — I was that person just a week ago myself!!!

Being a parent is a lived experience. I read so many books about it during my pregnancy, and I spoke to friends and I said stuff that sounded understanding like: “You must have your hands full” when I texted them about their babies. But I didn’t realize exactly how FULL their hands were (you have to make decisions like do I shower or take a dump or take a nap — constantly — because you can only do one at most before the baby needs your attention again!). I also didn’t realize how full their HEARTS were. From the outside when I was in my 20s, it seemed nuts to me that some friends had had kids. It seemed like they had “ruined their lives” and when I met them and they talked about diapers and their children endlessly, I thought “how boring for that to be your life“. Now I get it…because I am that person who celebrates a good poop!! It’s not boring: these are the most important, relevant, and meaningful topics now — they are indicators of my child’s health which is my number one priority. Everything else is far less relevant for now.

I also didn’t understand why one baby required so many adults to take care of it. It’s just one small baby, I used to think. Two people should be plenty, I thought as one friend was telling me about how she had both her parents, her husband and a postpartum doula help for the first six weeks. Now I think that might be enough people.

In the first four days at least, every feed and diaper change was a production, and it still kind of is! Take breastfeeding: I never expected it to be so difficult as it it is for me (lucky mamas who can do it easily!). Breastfeeding in movies is you whip out a breast, put the baby on in one second and then blissfully feed for 10 minutes whilst the birds chirp around you happily, all the while your breast looks amazing too like you’re a lingerie model. Breastfeeding in real life is a very different experience for most women! There can be latching issues, soreness, pain, milk undersupply, leaking and so on. And oh God, it’s not a pretty sight, unless Victoria’s Secret is hiring for real beat-up nipples and one breast being larger than the other…

What I used to think of lactation consultants before I had a baby:

What I now think of lactation consultants:

Insight #2: You thought you would be different as a parent but then you aren’t

Relatedly to #1, I thought I would not be one of those “annoying” people who shared photos and videos of their baby endlessly. I thought I was such an objective person, and there are 8 billion people in the world and all babies look the same and I would not be so irrationally enamored with mine. I would love him, but you know, I would keep a “balanced view”. “They’ll give you the parent goggles” my partner reassured me. “They give those to everyone in the hospital”.

And he was right…

My baby is the most handsome baby in the world. He is so charming! His every expression is adorable, from his grumpy face to his smiles, from his motorboating my nipples to the particular way he cries that sometimes sounds like a hyena laugh! And I’ve been videoing moments and wanting to share them to the world — so that everyone can know how amazing he is. But I feel sad sometimes that they won’t all really know him, because they weren’t there for it all, they saw a few photos but they couldn’t look into his curious eyes and see how intelligent he is.

And so here I am: the clichéd parent who thinks her baby is the best human to have graced the earth with his presence!

Insight #3: There is so much knowledge that parents have and it’s so under-rated as a job

You have to learn a whole new life curriculum as a parent. It’s like doing a bachelor’s degree every week, a masters every month and a PhD every year. And yet it’s an unpaid job, and often poorly supported in most countries.

I have so much respect for all parents now. It is NUTS to me that there is a motherhood penalty in the workplace. Mothers get penalized and lower pay because it’s assumed their skills have deteriorated and their attention is not on their work. Whereas if anything, you gain so many skills as a parent:

• You have to be way more efficient and organized than as a single person: you have to figure out the quickest, safest and most digestively-friendly way to get the most appropriate pumped milk into your baby at the right temperature at 3am. Going out of the house requires a whole new level of planning and organization with a ready-packed bag with spare outfits, diapers, diaper bag for dirty diapers etc.
• You have to have a lot more patience: one of my goals for 2021 was to work on my patience. Oh boy, do I have opportunity for that now! When you change a diaper, do a feed, and then baby poops and you change the diaper again, and then he wants to be fed again, and then you are worried there’ll be another dirty diaper again, and all the while you’re looking at the clock realizing your nap time is quickly diminishing, you have to develop patience. Patience is a necessity now, unless you want to end up in child services, and love is the guard-rail. I lose it with my mother and partner every now and again unfortunately, but not with my baby because that is a bright line I know not to cross (hopefully it stays that way!!!), and I hope my partner and mum know how much I love and appreciate them, despite the occasional sleep-deprivation-fueled grumpiness from me.
• You have to work as a team with your village: nothing teaches teamwork like taking care of a baby. You have to assign roles and responsibilities between you and whoever is helping you keep the baby alive (hopefully several people as we discussed). You have to be flexible in those roles and responsibilities as they change with the needs of the hour!
• You have to become good at reading subtle cues: Is my baby hungry, or over-tired, or gassy? What other job requires so much reading of facial expressions and mannerisms and crunching so much data in your brain to find patterns?

And this is an incomplete list, because one thing that does admittedly suffer at least temporarily is memory, and I can’t remember the other skills right now…

Parenting is like doing a bachelor’s degree every week, a masters every month and a PhD every year.

-Brown Girl Confidence

Insight #4: Pregnancy and childbirth can completely change your perspective on the female body – for the better

I used to think I’d care about losing weight after my baby, and that it would be my goal to do so as quickly as possible. But it’s the least of my concerns, bottom of the list. It’ll happen when it happens. It’s not nearly as important as just making it through the day, enjoying my baby, and being as kind as possible to the people parenting with me.

I used to be kind of modest. If giving birth doesn’t get rid of that, I don’t know what will! I spent 4 days in the hospital meeting a barrage of doctors, nurses, and room service folk whilst wearing see-through mesh underwear and bare-breasted. The highlight was when I was walking down the hospital corridor in my gown that my partner had fastened in the back but apparently jk he hadn’t really fastened it and one of the nurses saw me and gave me another gown to drape on my back. I got back to my room with two gowns on and didn’t even have a go at him for it — progress!

Now I see how cruel and oppressive our society is to women about their bodies – both men and women inflict this oppression on women. Women are told to look good, to show our bodies in certain ways to please men and sell products (wear bikinis, lingerie etc. which is good if you do it to celebrate you, but bad if you’re pressured to do it to fit norms) and to hide our bodies in other ways to not offend men’s wives (Don’t show a nipple! This one is mostly about women policing other women actually is what I’ve come to realize from my research and talking to women on mommy forums about it). We’re so policed, when we should all be free.

It is appalling that people would have any objection to public breastfeeding. If you’re offended, the problem is you, not the woman feeding her baby. No baby should have to wait whilst hungry or be fed in a bathroom stall because other people are not mature enough to understand. Making women feel like they can’t breastfeed publicly is another form of oppression: a way to cut them out of conversations, make them leave the table, make things inconvenient for them when they are already tired and doing so much. I realize so deeply now:

• A woman’s body can be sexual, but is not only sexual. Like any body, it has multiple functions like keeping her alive and creating and sustaining new humans
• Nudity has context

I can’t believe it took me 31 years and having a baby to get this more fully. Indian culture stigmatizes nudity, particularly female nudity, to a crazy level. Interestingly, these are mostly Victorian values which many people think are originally Indian but are not. Thankfully, I feel closer to the other side of wokeness now than ever before, though I’ll probably regress back towards shyness when I’m around Indian people as I tend to.

I’m still not at the level of Pam from The Office though, who apparently got seen by a male lactation consultant…

---

There is so much more to say but now if you’ll excuse me, The World’s Most Handsome Baby is calling… 😍