Dear Mama

I’m new to the club. I’ve been wanting to become a member for years and I finally got my girl. She’s 4 weeks old now, but it feels like I just had her the other day. Is that right? Time doesn’t feel real anymore. She doesn’t even look like a newborn. She’s starting to getting longer, bigger and (still) looking like her Daddy.

I spent years preparing myself for pregnancy and birth as best as I could. Reading all that I needed to so I knew what to ask my doctors, preparing my birth plan, mentally preparing myself for the moment I actually needed to push a baby out my cooter.

What I didn’t prepare myself for was postpartum. The fourth trimester. I knew about it. I knew it would come, but I wasn’t expecting it to come in the waves and avalanches that it did.

I sobbed our second night home because she wouldn’t latch. She was screaming and crying and I didn’t know how to soothe her. The first wave of, “am I doing enough?,” questions that overcame me. I wasn’t even able to feed my daughter. How was I a good mom if I couldn’t even provide that? I know that was the anxiety coming in full force.

I cried and cried and cried when I was told to get over my fear of driving by myself, alone with her for the first time. When my mind was telling me a million times, “what happens if you get in an accident and she’s left with no mom?”

Or when I was told that I wasn’t producing enough to feed her.

As if my mind wasn’t telling me already that I wasn’t doing enough.

The depression came eventually. I would stare at my daughter while she cried because she didn’t want to eat, didn’t need a diaper changed and didn’t want a pacifier to soothe her. What more did she want?

Mama. She just wanted Mama. I remind myself that it’s not doing too much to hold her constantly. It’s not too much to rock her to sleep and to keep holding her after she’s already fallen asleep. If the house doesn’t get cleaned, your child was held and loved. If the dishes aren’t done, your child was held and loved. If the laundry is still sitting in the basket after 3 days, your child was held and loved.

So, mama.

You’re doing enough. You are their safe space. You are their comfort zone. You are their home.  You are doing the most hardworking, most rewarding, most impossible job out there, but you’re doing it and you’re doing it with love.

I am proud of you, dear mama.