The first few weeks of Esme’s life passed in a bit of a blur. I was absolutely determined to persevere with breastfeeding, despite knowing deep down, that it wasn’t working. She wanted to feed constantly and had no routine.
The first day I managed to successfully leave the house for an hour I felt not only the pride and success of an olympian having just won a race, but absolutely exhausted. After 5 wks, Max intervened and we gave her a bottle. I hated it at the time, feeling like an utter failure as like my pregnancy, I felt my body was rejecting what should be coming naturally to me, but afterwards, when she settled and slept in her actual moses basket for 5 hours, I could see the logic and the benefit. I did still feed her too, but only for a couple more months, I found it a good excuse to need to take her back when we were in company, I was ridiculously protective of her.
By 3 months I felt more at ease with it, I had developed coping strategies and was finding solutions to the things I’d initially struggled with. The one thing I hadn’t expected tho was the change in my Mum. She had always been so excited about being a Granny and I’d expected her to be really keen and hands on. In reality she withdrew from me, after a while I addressed it with her and she admitted to not feeling able to bond with Esme as not only did she not look like me, she consumed a lot of my time. She saw her as a third wheel in our relationship and seemed to struggle with the new dynamic. I found this really difficult at the time, but feel more sympathetically about now. Grandparenting is never really discussed is it? It’s just assumed it’ll be an easy transition for them, but I guess its a massive change for them too, and one often filled with the expectation of free childcare and around the clock support. Maybe its wrong of us to expect so much.
My health visitor invited me to a group for local new mums when Esme was 6 month olds, I honestly couldn’t see the benefit, I felt it was something I might have found useful at an earlier stage, but I was kind of past that now and initially declined. I am so glad I went. Our little group turned into the support that I hadn’t even realised I needed, and despite different postcodes now, 10yrs later we all still keep in touch. Our group consisted of a mix of situations and personalities, and it worked really well, we met every week and more, and as we all got to know each other, seemed to spend less time talking about weaning and lack of sleep and more about how we were all desperate for a good night out and when the hell we’d ever be able to fit into our old clothes again! (We’d naively assumed we’d be back into our size 10’s immediately, 6 months later we were all still in our maternity jeans!) Between us we muddled our way through the baby and toddler stages. We definitely did share baby tips and spent many an hour discussing the virtues of various different pieces of advice given by the umpteen parenting ‘experts’ out there, but we were also just normal working mums, wives, daughters and more, winging it together! Max affectionately called us ‘the fishwives’!
When Esme was two, we decided to brave it again! We were both from big families ourselves, she was never going to be an only child! And after all, we were experts by now, surely?! This, we thought, will be a breeze….!!!
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It's a mums life. 