The instructions in my new motherhood welcome pack did not explain the wonders and joys of a fresh postpartum body, mind and soul.

Nobody tells you about how you are going to dread and fear every time you have to go to the bathroom, or how you would love to have no feeling in your nipples those 1st few weeks whilst baby is learning to latch or the stress of not producing enough milk.

They also don’t tell you how for the next couple of months you will smell like a ricotta factory after waking up in a sea of milk, how taking a shower is liquid gold, how your hair hasn’t seen a brush in a while as it’s been petrified into a mom bun.

What the collective they DO tend to repeat is “sleep when the baby sleeps”.
How is that even possible there is just so much to do, to get done and with my mind racing at 1000TPM (thoughts per minute)?
Trying to make sense of it all or trying to go back to how things were prior to giving birth and just add a baby is how you experience a reality check of grand proportion.

Burn out is the effect of this unrealistic cause.

The first step is getting used to not having a routine at all, that will come eventually (and just when you are comfortable with some sort of a routine-BAM- baby decides it’s time for something new and different).

Sporadic nappy changes, cluster feedings, don’t make sense of it all, just let go of all things and take it nappy by nappy, feeding by feeding. Don’t force the routine, or the expectation of one, it will come when the baby is ready.

Delegate as much as you can with whomever you have in your corner. I was always a person who tried to do things on my own before asking for help. If I can do it I will. This was just who I was prior to the baby. I was surprised when I realised this trait does not help the situation at all, all it did was burn me out. If it can wait, it can wait, if someone else can do it, let them do it.

One less thing to think about goes a long way.

I was trying to handle the baby, the house, work, the Covid situation, and myself all at the expense of myself, and before I knew it I was having minor anxiety attacks. Mostly about how things are not going as planned, or how I expected it to go. Blaming myself for what I thought was the mismanagement of this beautiful experience.

Even to a point where I was upset with myself that I didn’t have a contingency plan for this Covid pandemic when it first broke out here in Italy – (my post partum inner self tsking at the fact I did not foresee this).

Forcing myself to sleep made it worse, I felt even more tired, more drained, more grumpy. Things that are not fair on the baby or even myself for that matter- I felt like I was regressing instead of progressing. The simple ” one step forward 10 steps backwards” syndrome- I felt like I was not getting anything done!

This kind of noise was in my mind racing like a caffeinated hamster on a wheel eventually wore me out.

That’s when I decided enough was enough – insert Barbara Streisand and Donna Summer here- I am not going to let mine or anyone else’s expectations of this experience dictate to me what I should be doing.