When my first baby was born, I didn’t change his nappy for three days.
With my mum staying with us and my husband, Matt, on two weeks of parental leave I was looked after as well as the baby. Mum, a midwife and nurse of many years, showed us how to bathe the baby, got breastfeeding established and generally taught us what to do with a newborn.
I was high as a kite on my new baby hormones, surrounded by my loving family and given the time and space to recover physically from a gruelling birth. I was a dreamy, content new mum.
Then my mum and then my father went back to their homes 600km away and Matt went back to work. It was just me and the screaming baby, 10 hours a day, five days a week.
When Mum returned, my son was 10 weeks old and I was no longer the dreamy, content new mum she had left behind. I was a teary overwhelmed mess. A baby who never stopped crying, low milk supply, sleep deprivation and hours spent alone with him meant I was well and truly in the tunnel, barely able to see ahead to the next hour let alone the next week. I was singularly focused on what the baby wanted, what the baby needed, what the baby was demanding.
Matt was bathing the baby one night while I stood by. I leaned over to fix something, maybe the way he was holding him. The next day when Matt was at work and Mum had somehow used her wizardry to get the baby to nap, she said to me: “Don’t become the expert in the baby, Bridie.”
She told me when my partner’s home he’s going to do things differently. He’s going to feed the baby differently, bathe the baby differently, put the baby to sleep differently.
Because of the way most parental leave is set up, the birthing parent is going to spend far more time with the baby at the beginning than the other parent. Because of that you think you know the correct way to do things.
But my mum told me, don’t become the expert.
Don’t correct your partner on how they change the baby or feed the baby, or whatever with the baby, because if you correct them then they will lose confidence and you both will become convinced that your way is the correct way.
Then you will go back to work and still be the expert. And the baby will go to school and you will still be the expert, the one who does everything for them, knows what foods they should eat, what the routines are, how everything should be done. The person who is always turned to.
You may look at them bathing the baby and think it’s the most ridiculous method you’ve ever seen, but walk away, don’t be the expert in the baby.
It is the most profound advice I have received and potentially the only time I have ever immediately taken on board what my mum told me. But she was absolutely right.
By the nature of spending so much time with the baby in those months, I did know him intimately and could do things quickly, respond to certain cries. But my husband developed his own approach – after all, it wasn’t rocket science. He figured out his son.
Now we are parents to a four-year-old and a two-year-old and I never have to explain anything as I’m walking out the door to pilates or lunch with the girls. He knows what he’s doing.
