The first month

The story so far:

Wednesday morning, April 19th. No sooner had our heroine Charlotte been born than she was separated from her parents and whisked off to the Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) to be monitored, due to suspected poo-swallowing. Eww. 

  

The hospital

As prospective parents, nobody tells you about the SCBU. Although we were cheerfully informed of the myriad potential horrors of labour, we blithely assumed that we would be able to cuddle our newborn child and indulge in the promised skin-to-skin bonding as soon as it popped out.

The odds of a baby ending up there are admittedly low, but the sombre ward was still close to fully-occupied when we warily trudged in. Bassinets and incubators bore tiny boys and girls of varying fragility, with some parents maintaining pensive beside vigils. From the whiteboard in reception we could see that one child had been born at 28 weeks and must have been living there for months. Although from this perspective Charlotte was one of the luckier ones, it sure didn’t feel that way seeing her in the incubator with cannula in her wrist and multiple tubes attached to her. We were allowed to stroke her gently and no more.

The uncomfortable yet brutally honest truth is that on some level we were glad to only make a short visit. We couldn’t do anything for her, and weren’t allowed to bring any food, drink or possessions into the ward because of infection risks. After 12 hours Charlotte was able to stay with my wife in the maternity ward, but needed twice-daily trips back to SCBU for more antibiotics for the next three days until the doctors finally discharged her.

The ward is a strange old place. Hospitals being great social levellers, unless you’re one of the super-rich elite who can afford to splurge on luxury privacy. you are likely to encounter fellow residents who may not, to put it kindly, share your grasp of cultural etiquette  and may think nothing of demolishing a kebab at 9pm, as a hypothetical example*. Then there’s the underwhelming food, necessitating many trips to the nearby Sainsburys and Costa, and horrifyingly unhygienic showers (so I’m told).

Another guilty admission: I was relieved to go home to sleep every evening and leave my wife to the mercies of the ward. On the first night, after being awake for nearly 40 hours, I crashed out at 8:30pm for probably the greatest sleep of my life.

On the other hand, a new baby is one of the most purely joyful occasions for friends and family, and so our hospital stay were full of excited calls, visits and picture attachments. Furthermore, midwives and feeding consultants are on call to help you look after your child day and night, who are without exception marvellous and dedicated and deserve to be more than ideopolitical footballs. After a long stay, you get really used to their presence and it makes that car seat-christening journey home that much tougher. When we crossed the threshold late on Saturday evening, we treated ourselves to a takeaway Dominos and slumped, shellshocked, on the sofa, thinking what the hell do we do now?

*which actually happened

The feeding

For the next two weeks, feeding was the most harrowing aspect of new parenthood bar none. Exclusive breastfeeding had always been our goal, but due to Charlotte’s rough start and course of antibiotics we’d been told to top this up with a mixture of expressing and formula feeding on a strict three-hourly schedule. Finger-feeding, which involved taping a tube to my finger so that my daughter could suck it up from a small cup filled with milk, was an immensely messy and fiddly process, which required the purchase of a cold water sanitizer and tablets to clean up all the equipment, plus syringes to clean out the tube each time.

We also had to buy a manual breast pump, because despite the crazy amounts of stuff we’d bought beforehand, we naively thought that breastfeeding surely couldn’t be that hard, right?

Right?

After a few days, when every three-hour cycle we breastfed, then finger-fed, then expressed, then cleaned and sterilized everything (then used ready-made formula bottles at night), we were utterly frazzled. First we gave up the finger feeds, which we carried on for too long because nobody had actually told us when to stop. That left ‘just’ the breast and expressing, plus the night-time formula bottles. In theory this should have been easier. But although Charlotte would seem to latch on to my wife correctly and with gusto, she was often sucking purely for comfort, and all the pumping in the interim was yielding minimal results. The only time she really seemed to properly sleep was when we loaded her up with formula in the late evening.

Here’s the thing. Breast Is Best is what you’re told from the outset by the midwives and numerous books, and your local NCT, which if you’re middle-class enough you will almost certainly join, are the chief cheerleaders. And without embarking on an extended NCT rant, although our main instructor was funny and engaging, the breastfeeding class offered a comically rose-tinted picture of this supposedly most natural of processes. Of course it’s healthier and better for your child, they say, so if you just follow our advice then you’ll experience togetherness the likes of which you’d never dreamed of.

The pressure to avoid the bottle is subtle and insidious. The upshot being, when you feel like breastfeeding is not working, it can feel like a failure on your part, that you’re just not trying hard enough. Our decision to switch was an agonising process, we debated every single pro and con, and still it induced untold guilt. It was made harder because Charlotte was latching on and some milk definitely was being produced. In other words, a decision coloured in perfect shades of grey.

Ultimately, we could have carried on down this route – encamped on the sofa, feeding on demand and pumping away in the spare moments. For many women, slobbing out all day in front of Netflix, punctuated by Tipping Point and The Chase, would be tantamount to slavery, and understandably so. Others would argue that sacrificing your own happiness entirely for that of your child is a mother’s duty in the early weeks and months. Ultimately, breastfeeding was making all three of us miserable, and it just didn’t feel sustainable.

So many mums don’t ever breastfeed, or switch to formula very quickly, including lots of friends whose children seem pretty normal (mostly). My wife certainly was, and there have been many improvements in infant formula recipes in the intervening decades.

No right answer exists. Everybody is different, which makes the world go round and so forth. But when one option is pushed above the other to a relentless degree, it carries an inevitable risk of traumatizing a lot of people whose only crime is not being able to physically or mentally cope with an ultra-stressful process.

A rare happy moment? Probably just wind...

The sleeping

The major parenting lesson that trumps all others appears to be this: if your child is growing and feeding, you’re doing a good job. You are powerless to stop the crying and refusals to sleep beyond a few coping strategies that can sometimes minimize but never fully eliminate the problem. Accepting this situation, of course, is another matter entirely.

As it stands, five and a bit weeks in, Charlotte settles down in her pram in the late evening and then will sleep in her moses basket for hours, going straight back down after night feeds. Touch wood. When I tell people this they are amazed and often envious, and don’t get me wrong – it’s great not to be permanently replicating that zombied-out feeling I only get after staying up until 4am to watch the Super Bowl.

Well, here comes the ‘but’: the daytimes are still hard. Tougher for my wife, admittedly, who has to deal with Charlotte’s bitter struggles against sleep every single weekday. But it’s in my nature to feel guilty and worried about most things anyway. Now multiply that low-level anxiety exponentially. I physically feel it as a dull throb at the bridge of my nose several times a day, usually when I’ve just been concentrating hard on something work-related or reading an interesting link from Twitter. It says ‘while you’re here, your wife is looking after your baby, who cries 90% of the time if you try to put her down in any stationary location or receptacle.’

Being driven around in her car seat usually sends Charlotte to sleep, as it does for most babies, and often a vigorous trip in the pram will induce a state of snoozing or at least calmness. But then why doesn’t she like the very expensive bouncer gifted by her honorary Aunties, which is essentially a vibrating, swinging car seat? How come she can be in what seems like a deep sleep in my arms, and then be wide awake and grizzling as soon as she is put down in her pram? Being forced to use a sling (which she’s still too small for really) or hold her all the time while indoors is not what either of us signed up for, because the books – oh, the books – all say our child should be sleeping 15-17 hours per day.

Hah.

You’re doing a great job, everybody says. Keep at it. This is just a phase that she’ll grow out of.

I’m sure she will. I just wish the cheeky little so-and-so would hurry up about it.