The Postpartum Waterfall: Tips to Survive Newborn Hell

postpartum

Feb 20

(Disclaimer: This post does not discuss postpartum depression or anxiety, but talks about the garden-variety intensity of the first few weeks with a new baby. If you suspect you are dealing with something beyond this, please contact your doctor or midwife right away.)

No matter how much you were looking forward to having a baby, or how much you love your new baby, the first several weeks can be seriously hard. For anyone. Even this might be an understatement. Sometimes the first several weeks can be sheer hell.

The immediate adjustment to living with a baby is enormous, intense, and can feel like going over a waterfall. Many people say it was the most difficult phase in their entire parenting experience. Why is it so hard? And is there anything you can do to make it easier?

Understanding why it’s so challenging is the first thing you can do to be ready. The second is having realistic expectations. The third is planning for it: having support systems in place to prepare, and to help you get through it. Everyone has their own unique postpartum experience, and it can range enormously in how hard it is, but is always safer to be prepared.

So let’s prepare.

Why are the first weeks with a new baby so hard? Here are four reasons.

1.Hormonal shift

During pregnancy, your body was pumping a maelstrom of hormones through your system. When the placenta detaches, it takes all those hormones with it, and some people experience something akin to withdrawal symptoms.

2. Physical recovery from the birth

The birth itself is a physically demanding experience, leaving you feeling exhausted, and sometimes a bit pummelled or sore. If you’ve given birth by caesarean, you also have to heal from the surgery, which adds an additional element of recovery. That feeling of not being at your best physically, as well as emotionally, can compound the overall postpartum experience.

3. Newborn neediness

Newborns are extraordinarily vulnerable, entirely dependent, needy little creatures. They can’t be put down almost ever, because their systems are regulated by contact with our body. Their needs are simple, but their needs are all-the-time. It’s like having to keep a balloon in the air: it doesn’t require any particular skill, but you can’t do anything else at the same time. It’s all consuming, even though it can be mind-numbingly boring. It’s like the worst nightmare of running on the spot and not getting anywhere: You can see the dirty dishes, the snacks or the shower, but you just can’t reach them.

4. Sleep deprivation

Babies need care all day and all night. Newborns do not have any circadian rhythms at all yet, so have the exact same needs around the clock. This is one of the identifiably and universally hardest parts of having a new baby: the extreme exhaustion. You might experience an abyss of torturous tiredness you never dreamed was possible. It can be hard to keep your head above water.

Now that you know how difficult the first few weeks can be, and why, what can we possibly do to survive this hell? How can we make the postpartum transition a little bit less rocky, and make it easier for ourselves to stay afloat?

Here are four things you can do.

1. Have realistic expectations

The first is already accomplished! Knowing what to expect, and understanding that it’s normal and that it’s not forever, can make a huge difference. In particular, understanding that it’s okay that your baby never wants to be put down, and doesn’t sleep much at a time–this is totally healthy, and totally temporary. Your baby has only ever lived inside your body, where all their needs are met continuously. It is natural for them to need the most womb-like conditions as they adjust to life on the outside. Hands-free time is something you will only dream about.

Except you can’t, because you won’t get enough sleep to actually dream. As well as never having free hands, you will also never have unbroken sleep. Your days and nights won’t look much different from each other for the first couple weeks. You might find yourself having breakfast at 3am, wearing pyjamas for four straight days, showering at midnight, or having no idea whether it’s 8am or 8pm. This is also normal. It’s like you live in a strange version of reality that isn’t tethered to the usual rhythms of the waking world. The newborn phase is not on your clock. It’s entirely on baby-time.

If you think babies only cry when they have a clear and easily solved need, you might find yourself knocked off your feet by how much babies actually cry in the first three months. It can be quite overwhelming! While it is advisable to respond whenever your baby cries, to hold them and soothe them, nurse them, cuddle them, bounce them, rock them, and do whatever we can to provide comfort, they don’t always stop crying. Especially in the first three months, which is when many babies are colicky, and when all their systems (digestive system, circadian rhythms) are going through rapid development. Many babies go through a ‘purple crying’ phase in the evenings. This can be horrifying if you’re unprepared for the fact that this is just normal for many babies.

Understanding this, picturing it, and accepting that it’s both normal, and situational, is one of the small factors that can help you cope. If you are not prepared for how consuming the newborn phase is going to be, it can knock you right off your feet. It can feel like getting pushed over a waterfall and scrambling for a foothold in the churning waters beneath. And even though you can never truly know what it will be like until you’re neck-deep in it, it is far better to anticipate that it will be hard, to have some sense of how chaotic the waters can be, and to be braced for it.

2. Planning

Before your baby arrives, try to imagine what it might be like to have no hands-free time, no sleep, and no routine. Try to imagine that you have to keep that balloon in the air, all day and all night. Imagine that it also cries. A lot. And you are not always sure why. What would be helpful? It is a good idea to picture this in advance so you have a sense of what kind of structures you might appreciate when the time comes. Here are some common ones.

Place snacks and drinks on every coffee table and bedside surface, so you can grab something without getting up or thinking (this can be your early labour project).
Minimize obligations where you have to be somewhere at a certain time, and avoid morning appointments completely.
Limit visitors, unless they are really helpful.
Make and freeze meals ahead of time so you only have to re-heat instead of shop, prep, or cook.
Ask for frozen meals as baby shower gifts, whether home-made or from Costco. (These make more useful gifts than cute newborn clothes).
Don’t attempt to do too much: no more than one activity in a day.
Comfy clothes in which you can sleep, greet visitors, and dart to the corner store. Pyjamas meet sweats.

Setting these systems in place is like throwing a lifesaver buoy over the waterfall before you leap. It is enormously helpful to have it waiting there for you at the bottom, so that you can lean on it instead of relying entirely on your own flailing limbs. Picture how much more exhausting it is if you have nothing to grab hold of, and how much respite a single flotation device could provide. Now imagine there are two, or three, or lots of lifesavers floating around you. The more buoys you have in place the better.

3. Support Systems

This might be the most important element for surviving the newborn phase: having help. You will benefit from help with all areas of housework, cooking, pet-care, shopping, and almost everything else. Where you find this help can take many forms. Here are some ideas. You can probably think of more.

Consider hiring services for some of your chores: grocery delivery, housecleaning, dog-walking. Especially dog-walking.
Consider taking advantage of ready-made products to reduce your workload a bit: microwave dinners, paper plates, plastic cups.
Consider ordering in often, pizza or sushi or whatever you like.
Consider posting a list of chores on your fridge, to which you can point visitors when they ask what they can do to help.
Consider creating a Mealtrain so your friends and family can organise when to bring you food
Consider asking your parent, sibling, neighbour, best friend, or a teenager you know, to take baby for a short walk, or to dance with the baby in your living room, while you sleep for 20 minutes,
Consider asking for chores as baby shower gifts. Friends and family can make you ‘coupons’ that you can redeem for vacuuming or lawn-mowing, emptying the litter box, or taking out the compost.
Consider asking for services as baby shower gifts: pre-paid housecleaner, dog-walker, or take-out food; gift cards for services to redeem when you need them.
Consider hiring a postpartum doula to help you through these most challenging days or weeks
Consider attending a parent/baby group like these ones to commiserate, normalise, and finding common ground with other people who are also deep in the trenches

Support systems are really important. Traditionally, most people would have their extended family members come help during the postpartum phase, bringing meals, doing housework, and giving tips based on their own experience. We don’t all have family locally, so we sometimes have to build support systems in any creative way we can: friends, neighbours, services, doulas, community resources, healthcare team… It does take a village, and your village can be a patchwork from all available areas. When you are treading water, these are the people and services who bring you food, who look after your other concerns that you can’t attend to right now, who give you advice, who throw you more life saving buoys that you can grab onto.

4. Full surrender

Don’t fight the currents. Drift. Float. Embrace the chaos. Lean into the crazy. Let the newborn phase be what it is.

If you are trying to maintain your familiar schedule, sleeping at night and staying awake all day, or eating meals or bathing or even toothbrushing at your normal times, you run a higher risk of constant frustration with how overwhelmingly impossible this is. It can make you feel resentful, impatient, and frantic for normalcy. But if you’re able to let go of your habitual expectations of what’s supposed to happen at any particular time, and just go with the flow, it can reduce some of the stress of this intense phase.

If you’re not trying to do anything else, holding your sleeping baby can be quite lovely and restful. But if you’re also trying to get stuff done with a baby that never wants to be put down, this can feel stressful and triggering. If it’s late and you just want to go to bed, but your baby keeps crying, this can be unbelievably frustrating. But it can be a bit easier if you have already accepted that your only job this evening is to comfort your baby, and that you don’t have to be anywhere tomorrow anyway. Go with the flow. Let other agendas slide as you float in these new currents.

During the intense postpartum phase, there is a bit less struggle if you follow the path of least resistance. Sleep whenever you can, in short bursts. Sleep wherever is easiest, even if it’s not your usual arrangement. Take turns holding the baby while you eat (chopsticks are easier than fork/knife for this). Sit on a birth ball while you hold the baby so you don’t have to stand up every time the baby needs motion. Abandon any of your usual grooming habits you can bear to let go (shaving, blow-drying, jewellery). Forgo any housework that you can live without being done (vacuuming, dusting, mopping). Don’t fight the currents on this–let yourselves be carried wherever they take you. Drifting with these crazy eddies is much easier than trying to swim against them. You’re in newborn mode, and it is not forever. The waters will calm.

I like to think of the newborn phase as a bizarre little bubble of life that is not connected to the rest of the waking/working world. The rhythms of your days and nights are attuned to your baby’s needs, and no one else’s. If you can fully embrace it, it can be kind of fun in its own bizarre way. Magical and memorable. Like a holiday from your usual reality, where there is no such thing as days or nights, no such thing as time. Not the relaxation you might normally expect from a holiday, but certainly the adventure. Not easy by any standards, but not entirely negative either.

But the main thing to remember is that this is not forever. This is not what your life will look like in one year, or six months, or even in six weeks. You start learning how to navigate the currents and keep your head above the water. The first couple weeks can be truly off-the-charts insane, but it does start to get easier, more familiar. And eventually it all starts to feel normal. One day you will notice that the effort to stay afloat isn’t as hard anymore, that the churning currents have levelled off and you are now able to swim more easily, in any direction you choose.

This is partly your baby getting older, easier, more predictable, and partly just you adapting to having a baby. Your body heals, your hormones stabilise, and one day you even start getting more sleep (that one takes a while). So if you can, lean into the chaos and try to relax through the bumpy ride. It can be terrifying, overwhelming, stressful, and hellish at times, but there might also be moments of laughter, bliss, magic, and love. Hopefully many of these. Eventually there will also be routine, familiarity, and normalcy. But in the meantime, it really helps to know what to expect, to plan for it, to have support systems in place, and to accept it for what it is: an all consuming phase of parenthood. You have jumped over a waterfall. The landing waters are churning and frothing and terrifying, but they carry you through channels that empty into calmer streams, and eventually back to dry land. You can’t climb back up the waterfall. You can’t fight the currents. It is much easier to lean into the adventure.