Pregnancy and Motherhood II

The birth of a child is the most exciting and life changing experience of a woman’s life. She feels overjoyed as well as overwhelmed by her new responsibility. She is happy as well as taken aback by the way her life has suddenly changed.

During her pregnancy she was the focus of everyone’s attention. She was pampered all the time and wasn’t allowed to do one more thing than what was necessary. She was treated like a queen. But now, she is the one responsible to look after a tiny baby who completely depends on her for survival.

The feeling of holding the baby in her arms feels like heaven but the thought that scares her most is that she knows nothing about taking care of a new born baby. She depends on the brief advice of professionals and the unreliable advice of well-wishers to take care of her most precious possession. She is under the microscope all the time and is being judged as a mother by how she takes care of her baby. One mistake and she is labelled as a careless mother. She is expected to learn on her own how to feed, massage, bathe, and soothe the baby. Her instincts are expected to work over time to be able to pinpoint the cause of discomfort of her baby the moment her baby starts to wail.

No matter how sacred, loving and healthy breastfeeding may seem at the beginning, the mother might get tired of it by the time the baby completes three or four months. If the baby takes about an hour to satisfy its hunger, the mother has to be available for just feeding the baby for ten hours in a day apart from attending to other chores. Twenty four hours in a day just don’t seem enough to finish doing everything. Thus, it is a great help to the mother if at least a few feeds of the baby are substituted with formula milk. This also helps in giving the mother a reasonably good sleep at night.

A new mother is forever plagued with the worry about her baby getting enough milk, growing up normally, catching a cold, suffocating over anything in the cot, the list goes on. Even at night, she looks at her baby every two minutes to make sure everything is in place and her baby is fine.

Not only this, once the baby comes into picture, the relationship with her husband might also suffer. This is because her focus of attention is now her new baby and most of her energy is spent in its upkeep. She tries so hard at making her baby’s environment safe and comfortable that she sometimes ends up hurting her loved one’s feelings. Taking care of the baby takes up all her time and she loses contact with the other important people in her life. Everything else apart from her baby seems unimportant. Taking out even a little time for herself makes her feel guilty.

But all of this doesn’t stop her from enjoying the new joy of her life. And as the baby gets a few months old and life with the baby falls into a pattern, everything seems to come back to normal.