People talk about the newborn phase as the hardest one to share, as parents. Best intentions come up against biological realities. This is how we approached it.
Weeks 1-4: survival mode
We were both on leave, allowing us both to go all-in.
We gave ourselves clear roles, as we did during pregnancy.
I was the Head of Nutrition. It was my job to (1) feed the baby, and (2) rest and recover. Why do we underestimate the latter?
Sometimes at night I thought that if I’d had injuries like this from anything but birth there would have been ambulances, police, counselling. If I’d hurt myself this way in a car accident there would have been weeks put aside for recovery and rehabilitation. Instead I was sleeping only a few hours a night and I was about to step back into a life that was utterly changed.
Tegan Bennet Daylight in The Details
Tee was Head of Operations and did… everything else. Settling. Burping. Every nappy and every bath. Procuring food. Housework and admin. The interface – and occasional gatekeeper – with friends and family. This was really effective in a few ways:
- It gave Tee areas of expertise. As ‘milk parent’ I had magical powers to make the crying stop. Tee’s new skillz rebalanced our dynamic.
- I was in no state to learn new things. Underslept, in physical pain and on a wild hormonal cocktail come-down – could there be a worse time to start a new job?!
- Not smelling like milk sometimes gave Tee an advantage e.g. for settling
We slept in shifts. I went to bed around 7pm, and Tee was ‘on duty’ in the living room – gaming or napping on the sofa. When Buddy woke, Tee fed him a bottle of expressed breast milk, gave him a bath and put him down again.* We changed shifts at the following feed, usually between midnight at 2am, which we marked with cookies and milk. Then I was on duty until 7am, feeding and sleeping on the sofa bed. In this way we’d each get 5-7 hours of uninterrupted sleep, as well as the pockets while on duty. (*The ‘bath, bottle and bed’ or BBB, popularised by Midwife Cath.)
Week 4-8: setting up our lives
I was on leave and Tee worked from home with flexible hours. This was valuable from several angles:
- He was an extra set of hands. I changed three nappies in the first 8 weeks.
- His physical presence meant that I could leave the house when Buddy was asleep – a walk to the coffee shop, even a hair cut.
- It gave me extra time to build up my confidence to fly solo with a newborn.
- He was a sounding board. Is that a hungry cry?
- We made decisions together. Should we buy a dummy? Is it too early for sleep training?
- He kept me sane. Unexplained crying, the PURPLE period, gas and colic all peak around week 7-8. Doing it solo is draining. Switching parents can be a circuit breaker for the baby, and let me walk around the block to clear my ears.
- He was company during what would have been a difficult time, magnified by isolation. Buddy arrived in the first wave of COVID, our family stuck behind borders, restrictions on socialising and a particularly good reason not to get sick. Tee had the option of going in to the office, which would have left me home alone all day.
The upside of not having family nearby? We muddled through it alone. Our mothers couldn’t swoop in, tell us what we were doing wrong, erode our confidence or insert gender roles.
I’m so grateful Tee returned to work slowly. There several ways to do this – working from home, catching up in the evening, shorter hours, taking days off. He used all of them.
As we emerged from the newborn fog, we were equally competent and confident at keeping a baby alive. We had made ourselves interchangeable. The only thing Tee couldn’t do was milk production, and we had a freezer stash and a tin of formula in case that ran out. We felt like equal parents.
I’m not sure what we’d do differently. Interested in how others did it.