When I left the safe cocoon of the hospital with my brand-new Baby A, I was terrified.
Not of the usual stuff – I had wasted so much time worrying about whether or not I’d know how to pick her up and hold her, yet when the time came, I never even gave it a second thought, knowing instinctively exactly how to nestle her into my arms.
Holding her, changing her, cutting her nails, feeding her – those weren’t the things that terrified me, mostly because I had already come to terms with the fact that I was going to mess up something and that I would learn from it and move on.
What worried me, really, was that I might not love her enough, or wake up one day and decide I didn’t want her or that she had only brought disruption to our lives. That’s what scared me. And that is normal, I think.
I say this so that you know that when I dispense advice, it’s definitely not from a platform of how cool, calm and collected I was in the months after Baby A was born and to let you know that I, too, was as sticky and messy as those diapers she produced at such an alarming rate.
I have a few friends who are expecting their own terrifying bundles and wondering how they’ll remember to support the wibbly-wobbly delicacy that is a newborn’s neck. Others have recently welcomed wrinkly newborns.
I may be unqualified to dispense it, but here is some advice for these new mums, most of which your mother-in-law will completely disagree with.
1. Take yourself and your baby out of the house. The Arab tradition of keeping mother and newborn indoors for the first 40 days is a recipe for disaster. Mr T and I took Baby A to the mall and out for pizza when she was three days old. It cheered me up and energised me.
2. You can take a shower. This is why bouncy seats and transparent shower curtains were invented. It might be a short shower but it still counts, even if you haven’t completely rinsed the conditioner out of your hair.
3. You can still go out to eat. In fact, it’s so much easier going out to eat with a newborn than a boisterous toddler. You might be cross-eyed with fatigue, but these are the halcyon days when your child is totally immobile. Embrace them.
4. Using a bottle is not the end of the world and it certainly does not mean you love your baby any less – it might mean that your breasts hurt, or that you don’t want to nurse in front of strangers, or that you’d like your husband to see what it’s like to get up at 3am for a change. For me, the bottle meant that my mother or Mr T could care for Baby A for a few hours so I could pass out, dead to the world – and that kept me alive, I’m sure of it.
5. This one is important: you know what you’re doing, you really do, and you’re doing it well. There’s enough information telling you how to do it better, how not to do it, how to do it like Gwyneth (it involves kale, I think) but no one else is raising your baby but you, so, good job.
Then again, you may want to ignore all of this. I am still rocking my 2-year-old to sleep and I still haven’t had a full night of uninterrupted sleep since Her Dictatorship came into this world, so what do I know?
Hala Khalaf is a freelance writer in Abu Dhabi