Working Mom?

Brutally honest account of a 34 year old first time mother of a 6 month old. I am retraining as a lawyer and due to start traineeship at major international law firm. This blog is about my experiences as a new mom and how I navigate my new reality as a new mother joining the young kids in a law firm and playing the game to get out on top.

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Current mood: eating my feelings.

Husband is away out with the baby for the day tg. I had breakfast - thought it would just be a bit of baguette. I had the whole thing.

Baby is unsettled. Starts stirring in the middle of the night, back arching and grunting and squirming. Have no idea what it is - she stops when she gets the boob...I am trying not to feed her during the night anymore as my book says 6 month-olds only need their dream feed at 10/11pm and nothing more. Not my child apparently, and of course the implication is that I have “accidentally parented”, i.e., I did not instil a good routine leading to her not wanting to feed through the night and instead offered her the boob to get her to settle down. When you are in these moments and going through these challenges it can feel like things will never be normal again. What is going on? What am I doing wrong? Am I doing anything fucking right? All the advice swimming around in my head, constantly bloody guessing what it could be? The question that strikes me at this moment is: are we spending so much time reading and swotting up on how to mom that we mom badly? Shouldn’t we just get on with it?

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I am so tired.

She is so curious about everything. Everything is new and exciting for her. What a wonderful state to be in. What’s difficult is maintaining that sense of wonderment yourself when trying to adult.

Today we have a wedding to go to. Will she be good? I have no reason to think she won’t be as she is always so good when we are out, except when she is tired. Naturally. No one is good when they are tired.

So we got that.

What we don’t have down at the movement is her feeding - she is not eating as much as she should be...it’s so frustrating as she wakes up at night and then wants to eat full meals! How can I fix that?

There is so much advice out there and, in my opinion, collectively all it does is serve to undermine our own natural parenting instincts. My solution is now to stick to one book on each subject (baby whisperer for baby behaviour and sleep and Weaning the Italian Way for weaning). I swear to god, I have lost the will to live when faced with the decision on just which book to choose. If you are like me and suffer from what they call “option stress” then wading your way through a results list on Amazon of the keywords “weaning” or “how to get my baby to sleep” you will know what I am talking about. There is something to be said for the age where all you had was your mother’s way of doing things taught to her by her mother and so on and so forth. I am not sure that the liberation of information in this regard is at all liberating.

So that is my challenge this week: eating and sleeping. Just the two most important things. So no pressure, right?