No, Not the Curtains!

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.

What the curtains?

Hello my loving and adoring fans.1

Before I start, I’d like to call attention to the fact that, not only did I post again like I promised I would, my post is coming on time!!4 For those who don’t have children yet and don’t understand why this might be a feat, you’re about to find out. Because in today’s post, we will be starting to talk about what having a first child is actually like, thereby giving you a peek into a world you can’t even possibly begin to understand or imagine.5

So I have to apologize because we’re gonna start with the lack of sleep thing. I know I ragged on everyone else for bringing this up all of the time, but I’m going to go a step further than them so that exempts me from my prior griping.6 What every person on the planet says is true: you aren’t going to sleep. But I was very recently where you are right now and I know what’s going through your naïve and smug little brain. You’re thinking, much like I was when in your position, “Psh I went to college. I’ve pulled my fair share of all-nighters. What’s the big deal?” If I were physically present with you right now, I’d slap you.7 If I am anywhere near you as you’re reading this, come get my attention so I can slap you. If you are not near me, please receive this digital slap. See, everyone tells you that you’re not going to get any sleep and that you’ve never experienced exhaustion the likes of which you’re about to experience, but they never explain why. Lucky for you, I’m here.8

When you pulled your all-nighter in college to write that 20-page thesis you had put off for the entire semester,10 you struggled through the following day by drinking enough caffeine-laden drinks to make a coma patient antsy. And then, and here’s the important part, you crashed. You went home and forced your legs to keep moving until your knees hit your bed, at which point you didn’t even get into bed; you just let your momentum carry you forward so that you fell into it, falling asleep before your face hit the mattress, and then you stayed comatose for 35 hours. When you have a baby, there is no crash. Your baby has no concept of time or night or day and no ability to put herself back to sleep on her own just yet. So your schedule consists of putting your baby to sleep,11 waking up every 10 minutes when she starts screaming again, panicking and destroying your phone when its alarm goes off just minutes after you’ve put the baby to sleep for the 14th time that night, dragging yourself through the day, breaking down and uncontrollably sobbing, and then starting all over from square one. There’s no crash. There’s no time to catch up on sleep. There’s just lots and lots of tears, and not all of them are coming from your baby.

“Okay,” you think, “That was…uh…enlightening? I guess I’ll just sleep when the baby slee…”

I’m sorry, but you didn’t get to finish that thought because THE BABY IS SCREAMING AGAIN.

Ahem. Sorry.

I had one person recommend to “just” sleep when the baby slept. See, to someone without a baby, that sounds like an excellent idea. Babies sleep a whole bunch during the day, it’s just spread out a bit. So you wait until she falls asleep and you join her in dreamland! How is that a problem?

Excuse me while I slap you again. Same rules as above apply. This foolproof idea actually brings us to my next point:

A baby is more time-consuming than traveling from Great Britain to the New World in the 1700s.12 Going into having my first child, I knew that I was going to lose a ton of free time to taking care of this mini-human. This wasn’t even one of those things that anyone warned me about; it just made sense that having a baby meant your free time was going to dwindle. Even though I went into having my first child knowing this, I still couldn’t believe how little time I had left to do anything at all.14 Because here’s another thing you just don’t think about/no one tells you about having a baby: life does not stop just because you need it to. And that’s the problem with the whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” advice. If you do sleep when the baby sleeps, then you don’t have clean clothes to wear tomorrow. Or maybe you don’t have clean dishes to eat off of. Or clean bottles that you will NEED when Baby gets hangry.15And you can’t just do your essential house chores while the baby is awake, either, because you will either be taking care of the baby or providing backup while your spouse takes care the baby. And they will need backup because they’re just as sleep deprived as you are.18

So there you have it. Two pieces of actually-practical advice on having your first child and what to expect from it all. And there will be more to come in the next post or few. And I know how terrifying this all sounds, so allow me to end on a positive note. There’s absolutely no practical way to tell you this if you don’t have kids yet because there’s nothing you can compare having a child with, so I’m going to have to use the cliché literally everyone else is using: it really is all worth it. You’ll be half awake with tears streaming down your face,19 holding a baby that hasn’t stopped screaming for 45 minutes, praying for death to just hurry up and take you and end it all, when that little girl will stop crying, look up at you, and smile real big at her daddy. And suddenly, while you’re looking at that big, toothless, goofy grin, everything will be totally okay. You’ll be surrounded by the mess that the tornado that is your baby has left of your house, your “things to do whenever the baby finally decides she wants to freaking sleep” list will grow by 10 items within a few seconds, and the uncontrollable faucets that are your eyes will continue gushing out water,21 but that smile will push all that out of your mind and it will all be worth it.

And then she’ll start screaming again.

Until next time, folks. Oh and if you have a baby between my first ‘new parent’ post and when I finish posting my actually-useful advice, I can’t help you. I’m sorry.

1 All 7 million of you.2

2 This statistic is 100% fabricated.3

3 No, wait! It’s real! Please stay! Please!

4 Believe it or not, I actually do attempt to post at 2-week intervals when I’m not dealing with a screaming banshee. I mean…a lovely and wonderful child.

5 This…makes it sound scarier than it actually is.

6 Also, I’m me and they aren’t, so I’m clearly better and deserve to be treated as such.

7 I will not apologize. If you’ve frequented my blog for more than one post, you’d know it’d be a lie if I did, anyway.

8 Cheer for my arrival.

9 That wasn't a suggestion. Cheer.

10 What? Am I the only one that did this?

11 A challenge in and of itself in many cases.

12 I never ever want to know what life was like for someone making that trip with a baby. Even thinking about that makes me want to get on board a “travel to the New World” reenactment boat13 so that I can jump overboard.

13 I don't care if these don't exist.

14 Namely, none. No time. Time ceased to exist. There was no time; only baby.

15 And they can go from playing happily to being more pissed off than an Internet troll before you even have a chance to snap your fingers.16

16 Which is not something you ever want to do when the baby is screaming. Why are you snapping your fingers? Go get the baby some food before she screams you out of your sanity! Oh crap. You don’t have a clean bottle because you decided you were going to sleep just because she was sleeping. Nice move, newby. Now you have to frantically clean a bottle while sleep deprivation does its best to slow you down and while the screaming grates away at your soul.17

17 Nothing destroys and drains you like a baby that WON’T. STOP. SCREAMING.

18 A message to all single parents everywhere: you are the most amazing person on the planet and everyone should kneel in your presence and just throw their money at you. I will never ever understand how you do what you do. You are awesome. And also, probably some kind of superhero.

19 You won’t be crying, by the way. Not in the traditional sense. Tears relieve your body of a chemical that is produced when you’re stressed, so if you ever get to the point that you’re stressed enough, your brain decides that all this chemical-y crap needs to go and tears will just start pouring out of your face. This may or may not have happened to me several times.20

20 This absolutely happened to me several times.

21 Though at this point, with that smiling face looking up at you, it might be for a different reason.