If women are from Venus and men are from Mars, what planet do babies come from?

Dearest Baby Bee

There are many things people tell you when they find out you’re having a baby, things like:

1. It’s such a magical experience

2. You’re going to make such good parents

3. Once you have one you’ll definitely want more

I think I can safely say having a baby isn’t quite the ‘magical’ picture that people paint it to be. There are magical moments and having you is amazing but, there are a lot of things people don’t tell you, such as:

1. Being a parent is bloody hard work! I thought it would be a pleasant reprieve from my job.

2. Babies are super complex, more so than adults or any creature on earth. I’m starting to wonder if they are actually from this plant.

3. It’s one of the most testing things you will ever do. 

4. Statutory maternity pay is not enough to live on especially if you’ve been used to being a two income household. 

5. No one prepares a women on what to expect post partum - it’s pretty rough and scary if you don’t know what’s coming. Hair loss, brutal menstrual cycles and super hormones raging through your body.

You were born in the midst of a pandemic which had its trials and tribulations. It made the last 5 months of my pregnancy and absolute breeze but it was also very isolating as new parents and we couldn’t really get much support from relatives and friends due to lockdown and restrictions and fear of the virus.  You’ve spent the first 6 months of your life only knowing mummy and daddy and the outside world is a weird and scary place to you.  I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll grow up to be a recluse or shut in who alienates anyone she meets?

Hindsight can be a cruel mistress, if I’d known that the newborn stage was actually the easiest despite the multiple nightly feeds then I would have savoured the first 6 weeks much more than I did. Gone are the days where you can literally fall asleep anywhere and a marching band could parade through the living room without even stirring you. Now a butterfly shitting 7 houses down wakes you.  If you had a user manual and rule book it would be forever changing and re-issued with amendments.  Just when I think we’ve got a good things going you rip the rug from under my feet.

I spent a good few hours completing online classes about sleeping, weaning and babies in general (novice mum here) and with science in my corner you were sleeping happily through the night from about 3 months.  Then you turned 5 months and like a wrecking ball demolishing a building you hit us with nap strikes, refusal to eat, all the symptoms of teething for weeks but not a little tooth in sight.  Science is failing me and it is very clear from all the different sleep apps and guides out there that no one really seems to know what the hell goes on in babies heads.  Are babies the worlds greatest enigma or is it just me?  The only thing that really makes sense to me at this stage is my ongoing theory that you may be from another planet or maybe some kind of imp like changeling (depending on your preference for syfy or the supernatural). They say women are from Venus and men are from Mars so surely it’s not so far fetched?

We’ve starting feeding you proper food and to begin with you absolutely loved it. I hoped this was the answer to your sudden disinterest in drinking milk but just as quickly as your love of food appeared it very soon fluttered away like a moth leaving a dark house seeking the light.  You seem to find great joy in waking up in the night again and we can’t really tell if you’re hungry, scared or just missing us! Maybe you’re receiving new intelligence from your home planet? If babies did come with user manuals they would be laid out like a combination of the worlds biggest flow chart and those stories you used to read as a kid where you can pick the ending by choosing a certain path for the main character and skipping to a certain chapter. The one that sticks in my mind- Do you want the knight to face the dragon and save the princess or return down the path he came? 

Are you the dragon or princess in this scenario?

Maybe if I was telepathic it would help me understand your needs or would it just frustrate me more, what if you don’t even know what you want? It’s not like I can ask you in 10 years time why you suddenly starting waking at 10.30pm and 2am every night when you were 6 months.  Insights like that would help parents everywhere.  I could make a fortune and live the high life. This would make a refreshing change as currently I’m sitting in 2 day old pyjamas that are smeared with aptamil and baby rice.  Random part of my body are caked with a mix of oilatum and hydrocortisone cream and there is an ungodly amount of caffeine coursing through my veins, mostly from the coffee I’m drinking but possibly also absorbed through my scalp from all the hair growth and thickening shampoo.  I’m jealous and perplexed by the glamorous mums you see with babies, how do they do it? After giving birth my hair started falling out, my skin dried out and cracked like the ground of the Sahara dessert and I spent 3 weeks sweating profusely from the hormone in-balance which caused heat rash to spring up all over me face.  Oh the  glamorous post partum life I lead. Lucky really that I’m not meant to leave the house unless absolutely essential and must keep 2 metres away from everyone.

Time is flying and the worries of returning to work are starting to bubble to the surface.  Will you be okay being left with grandparents that you just don’t know? Will I be able to get back into the swing of things at work? Will there ever truly be balance between home and work life? Will life feel normal again?

Normal is in the eye of the beholder so we’ll have to make our new normal and try to stop remembering what we used to do and focus on what we are going to do.

Things I ask of you this week:

- please start eating more milk and food- feeding you   shouldn’t be a battle.

- please start sleeping through the night again- I don’t mind if you want to wake up earlier just give us some chill time in the evening and sleep through till at least half 6 and if you could stop having your stinkier bowl movements in the earlier hours of the morning, pretty please. 

- please transition quickly to 2 naps- I’ve read that maybe this will solve the waking up in the night situation. As you likely a herald from Saturn or Jupiter I won’t hold my breath, normal human science will likely have little impact on you.

- if you do have a user manual that you’ve forgotten to drop off please feel free to leave it out on the desk in your room.

Crazy that I’ve spent approximately £450 so far on learning to drive as law dictates you need to have a licence to operate a vehicle yet, I can attempt to operate a baby with no licence and no training and no one bats an eyelid.....

TTFN

Love you lots

Mummy xx