Letter to a new mom

I have a couple close friends who are pregnant. I don't give advice generally unless someone asked, but one of them asked! So here's a version of the letter I'm going to send her.

There are just a few pieces of advice I wish I'd had before I started parenting, and that I'm glad to have the opportunity to remind myself of now, before I start the journey again. They go like this:

Make your decisions out of love. But understand that sometimes that love is love for yourself, for your husband, or for your relationship. That's all okay. 
We all tend to question ourselves: is it right to go back to work so soon, to not work, to breastfeed, to not breastfeed, to let the baby cry, to feed it conventional fruits, and a thousand other things. I think that if you are making the decisions out of love, you are going to be fine, and so will the baby. See, I could be a stay-at-home mom -- if we lived in a MUCH worse neighborhood and a smaller house. Am I doing the right thing by working? Well... YES! I get a lot of satisfaction from my career, and I am happy we can provide a safe and stable environment for my kid. That's love, for me, and for her.
If you are frustrated and stressed and tired and you really need to go get a massage and see a movie, then do it -- the decision isn't coming out of a LACK of love for your child, but out of self-love, which is important, too. And when you mess stuff up, forgive yourself out of that same self-love well. You'll be setting an important example.


Go ahead and make plans, but be flexible enough to change to plan B, C, D and so on. And to make new plans on the spur of the moment. 
We had so many plans when Z was born. First was the birth plan (which got scrapped when the birth went horribly awry). We planned to have her sleep in a crib in her own room (and then she screamed bloody murder, even from a deep sleep, when we took her anywhere near it). I planned to breastfeed until she weaned herself, which I assumed would be at about a year (HAHAHAHAHAHA! She kept going until 2 1/2, at which point I decided to bribe her to get her to stop). The thing is, babies really aren't cogs that you can fit into a pre-selected agenda. They are people, and just like with spouses and friends and co-workers and neighbors... you have to figure out how your needs and their needs meet and make allowances for the people they are. It's when you don't have flexibility that it starts to feel like butting your head against a wall, because, well, you are.



No one knows your child like you and your husband. 
People say lots of stuff. Sometimes they just like to hear themselves talk. Sometimes they are wise and sometimes they are full of shit (myself and this whole letter included). If YOU think there is something wrong with your kid, there probably is. If you think the kid is too tired to stay out later, they are. If YOU think they're allergic to gluten or ADHD or whatever, as long as you don't have a tendency to the hypochondriac, they probably do. I have a cousin who, at almost 3, still wasn't talking much. We all said it was no big deal, boys talk later, etc. But they had him evaluated, and he has Autism. They got early treatment for him, and he's integrated in regular classrooms now and doing brilliantly! The rest of us should have shut the fuck up, because the parents knew something was up. People tell me all the time that ADHD isn't real, or it's over diagnosed, or kids who are medicated turn into zombies, or yadda yadda. But I know my kid best -- she's not a zombie, and she's WAY happier and more successful on the medication.
This doesn't just go for negatives, either -- sometimes people will think there's something wrong with your kid ("He's so cold! Doesn't he need a sweater?"), and you'll know he's fine (he's snuggling contentedly). You know him best.



Keep the lines of communication open.
This one goes for the kid, too, but it's mainly relationship advice. Parenting together is HARD. Like, really hard. Sweetie and I pretty much agree on everything, never fight, and have spent 11 years without a major disagreement or even, if I am remembering correctly, raising our voices at each other. But parenting has made me want to kill him once in a while. Let's say, for example, that I think I'm doing all the work with the kid, or that I disagree with his methods of discipline -- I tend to seethe in anger, writing angry secret missives and lying awake at night. And then finally I get to this point where I say, "Hey, I'm feeling like this doesn't work." And sometimes then HE'S pissed off, seething that I would criticize his parenting, and probably (just a guess) filled with self-doubt, too. And then a day or two later, he starts addressing the issue, and life gets a lot better. You just have to talk about stuff.
Of course, this means listening, as well. I'm hoping my kid knows I listen to her and take her seriously, because if she does, then maybe she'll continue to talk to me into those rough teenage years. I can only hope.

Be consistent. 
You have no idea how hard this one is, and yet most of the problems we ever face around here are consistency issues. She had a bad day? We didn't get her to bed early enough the night before. Fight over cleaning her room? We didn't insist on the 5-minute before-bed clean-up we set in place. She's begging for candy before dinner? Shouldn't have let her have it yesterday as a special treat. Discipline isn't about punishment and consequences -- discipline is largely about having set expectations and sticking to them. Life is SO much easier when we don't screw this one up, even though the actual consistency part of it is really hard, too. Why NOT let her stay up, when there's only 10 more minutes of her program left? Why not skip the clean-up if I'm busy with other things? Consistency is a lot of work, but there's a lot of reward for it, too.

Enjoy it. 
Have you gotten this one yet? It goes so fast! They grow up before you know it! But seriously, yo -- I was JUST making this one laugh by nibbling her toes, and now she's explaining natural selection to me. Write stuff down. Take actual photographs and mental photographs. Relax and do stupid stuff, like going "AH-boo" a hundred times while poking the baby's nose. Cuddle. Take naps. The older kid stuff is fun, too, and someday I'm sure I'm going to enjoy it to an extent that she's gone and off to college or whatever. I know I'll be happy to see her get married and whatever else comes. But the little kid years do rush by, so try to be in the moment as much as you can.


I'm really excited to get to do this all again, even though writing this helps me remember some of the rougher times that I've managed to gloss over!