Welcome, dear reader,1 to post #3 on having a first child. This post makes three consecutive posts on the same topic, all posted two weeks apart, making this series the most coordinated thing I’ve ever done on this blog.2 The fact that all of this is happening when I have an almost-8-month-old makes this all the more confusing. Oh crap. Am I growing up? No! I can’t! Okay, I’m gonna be super childish riiiiiiight now:
On we must trod!3 In case you have not been following along,4 I’ve been trying to help soon-to-be-first-time-parents get a sense of what they can actually expect from having a first child. Check here for the first post and here for the second. This here is the third and final post, so…take notes or something. Whatever you adult people do when important things are being stated.
So far, we’ve discussed that a vast majority of the “advice” you’ve been getting on your upcoming bundle of screami- uh…joy – isn’t really advice at all and the lack of sleep and time you can expect from having a first child. More importantly, I’ve done my best to explain why these latter two things will happen, which is what most others don’t seem to do. Here’s some more practical advice:
So you won’t get any sleep and sleeping when the baby sleeps is nigh-impossible. We’ve covered that. Here’s the good5 part about this: you’ll be so sleep-deprived and tired that you’ll have absolutely no clue how dysfunctional you actually are! Yay!
The first six months of my daughter’s life were miserable for all of us. She hated everything when she didn’t sleep and she hated going to sleep.6 This resulted in almost-literally non-stop screaming unless she was sleeping, which, if you were paying attention in the previous sentence, was never. I knew I wasn’t getting much sleep and I knew I was exhausted; there were days at work where I literally felt like my brain was lagging several seconds behind real-time. It felt kind of like a video that was lagging a second or two behind its audio, except in real life and instead of audio/visual synchronization being off, it was audio/understanding. It was no fun and it probably made me seem like a major creeper because there were several days where I’d keep staring at people for a good few seconds after they had finished speaking as my brain caught up on what they were saying.
Even though I knew I was out of it most of the time, I had no clue how bad this was. The day that my daughter was born,7 my phone alerted me to a text and my response was to jerk and look towards it as though I’d just spotted a snake sitting beside me. During the first six months, I’d be speaking with someone and they’d tell me that we had already had that particular conversation. Several times, I went to send one of my brothers a text only to see the same exact text up above as the last text I’d sent him. Sometimes there’d even be a reply that I totally did not remember reading. I watched the first trailer that was released for Avengers: Age of Ultron at some point during those first six months. I remember standing there watching the trailer, but I can’t tell you one thing that was in it. A deep voice, maybe? I don’t remember. It gets bad. But you’ll have no idea how bad it is, at least not for a few months. So take solace from that.10
But don’t take solace from the fact that you’ll actually be sleeping, if only just for a few hours every night.11 Yup, sorry. Even when you’re sleeping, you’re not really sleeping. My daughter once randomly started coughing/choking in the middle of the night; I woke up after I had thrown the sheets off and made it halfway across the room to her crib.12 When you have a newborn,13 your brain doesn’t really fully shut down at night because it wants to make sure that your baby is, you know, not dead. Your eyes may be closed, but your ears sure as heck aren’t and your brain is keeping an…uh…eye on them to make sure Baby [insert-your-last-name-here] isn’t dying just because you need sleep. Which…I guess is a good thing.14
As you wait for your first baby to arrive, you also will have people tell you that your life will forever be changed completely when the baby arrives. This is also accurate, albeit not-entirely-descriptive and really mostly scary-sounding. Besides the more obvious changes that I discussed in the previous post, you’ll find that the baby will even change things when she’s not even present. Allow me to explain:
So there you are. Your baby just recently turned 3 months old and you and your significant other have decided that it’s high time you get some time to yourselves again. You drop the baby off at a parents’ house or you hire a babysitter and you’re off! You get to the movie theater, lean back in your chair, put your arm around the co-parent of your baby, and sigh. This. This right here is awesome.
“Finally,” you think, “Baby-free time. And I’m going to enjoy every single se-”
Sniff. Sniiiiiiff.
“Why do I smell poop?”
Yup. This is a thing that happens. Your baby is not present. In fact, your baby is nowhere near you. And you smell it. The good news: no, you don’t actually have any on you. The bad news: your nose just perpetually tells your brain that it smells poop now. Sorry. There’s not really much you can do about this other than cry, which isn’t going to fix anything, and which you’re already doing anyway.15 Welcome to parenthood!
Another way that your baby alters your entire mental state is what my wife and I like to refer to as “Phantom Baby.” Phantom Baby does not exist…at least not outside of your mind. Inside your mind, however, Phantom Baby is very, very real. Phantom Baby is an Inception-esque16 mental projection of your real baby that lives in your mind with one intention: make everything terrible.
You’ll be sleeping standing up in the shower when you suddenly wake with a start. Crying! The baby is crying! How long has she been going? How long have you been standing in the shower? Oh no, you must not have heard her because the water was running! What an awful parent you must be! So you frantically shut off the shower and get halfway dry before your incredibly-slow mind finally realizes that the baby isn’t screaming at all.
“Maybe she went back to sleep?” You think to yourself. But no. She did not go back to sleep because she was never awake to begin with. You’ve just experienced Phantom Baby. Fun, right?18
Thanks for reading, everyone. I’ll see you all again in two weeks as I return to my usual, completely off-the-wall random posts. Hooray!
1 Again with this?
2 And maybe in my life.
3 Am I doing this right?
4 In which case, shame on you! Shaaaaaaaaaame!
5 "Good."
6 What a great combination!
7 Yup, it starts that quickly! Hooray!8
8 *Glares.*
Are you ready?9
9 That was mean.
10 Or…like…something? I don’t know.
11 I’m taking everything from you, but your baby will have even less mercy.
12 And yes, this made me feel like an awesome dad.
13 …and you’re a halfway-decent parent…
14 Probably.
15 See footnote 19 here.
16 If you haven’t seen Inception, there is likely something wrong with you and you’re going to be a terrible parent.17
17 Okay. That was harsh. But you should probably watch it anyway. Just in case, you know?
18 Wrong.
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