To wonder why people want you to feel stressed about motherhood.

[Beebeezed]

Ever since I got pregnant and had my baby I have realised I that so many people like to tell you the worst parts of pregnancy, labour and motherhood.

Once I announced my pregnancy and explained I felt much better after a tough 3 months, the response was mainly ‘oh you wait til the third trimester!’ ... third trimester comes, tell people I’m mainly ok but feeling more tired... ‘ohh you wait till the baby is here. Then you’ll know what tiredness is!’

Baby arrives... tell people how I’m feeling (which is quite good actually overall, have been blessed with a good sleeper and feeder). The main response is ‘oh you wait for the teething, or the terrible twos etc’... it’s almost like people don’t want you to be enjoying it, and if you are they want you to be aware the tough is yet to come.

My hairdresser is pregnant, and I told her about my labour and she burst in to tears saying I was the first person to tell her a slightly positive labour story. (I left out some bits for the exact reason of this post!) So far all she has heard has been the horror stories and she’s petrified. I just don’t see why people feel the need to do this?!

I totally understand people have really tough times, but I just feel conveying this to pregnant people/new mothers is slightly mean.

Why can’t people just let new Mother’s enjoy the moment rather than telling them all the negatives they are going to deal with in the future?! Unless of course you’re really good friends, but I’m talking about Acquaintances or even people on public transport!

Has anyone else found this?

Parenting is pretty tough and I think people just want FTM’s to be realistic. Many FTM’s are teensy bit annoying (I was one of these!!) declaring how they will have their all natural birth with bells and whistles on, will definitely EBF, feed their children only organic meals and never let them watch TV etc. People just try to humble you, that’s all .

I have four DC and was very, very smug after DC1 was born because he was a dream baby (as DC4 is now) but then DC2 was born and she brought me back to Earth.

Also agree with ragwort, wish someone had warned me how hard BFing is at first. I thought it would be so easy and it just wasn’t.

I think the expectation of sleep is important. We didn’t expect to get a wink and when that happened it was expected. A friend who had a baby at the same time (not her first either) was in a total state 5 days in because she couldn’t cope with lack of sleep.

I knew that I wouldn't get much sleep with a baby. I didn't know how that would actually feel, though, because I'd never been sleep deprived for months on end before. I had always functioned on less sleep than average (6 hours is fine for me, and I regularly go to work on 5 and am ok with that) so I thought I'd not be too bad - what I didn't know is how badly I function with broken sleep. Again, that's individual - some people need many more hours of sleep than me, but can have it in chunks.

I didn't realise that it would get worse not better - DS's newborn sleep was actually the best we got until we did gentle sleep training at 9 months - and when DS was 8 months I thought I had developed depression (I've suffered from it in the past and it felt very familiar) - until I had one night away and felt great the next day.

These are my experiences. They aren't universal. Nor are yours.

Also, while I knew in theory that I wouldn't sleep in the early days, the brutal reality of that was a shock. The first night DS and I got home I hadn't slept in 48 hours, since labour had begun, and he cluster fed from 9pm-3am. Part of me was in total disbelief that it was all so badly designed, that I had to stay awake after the most physically difficult 48 hours of my life. I just remember DH sat there poking and poking me because I kept falling asleep but I couldn't yet feed lying down so I kept nearly dropping him.

I found the opposite outsho
I genuinely only ever heard horror stories about breastfeeding before I had children. People telling me how hard and painful it is and I should expect to fail. And I think this contributes to why some people don’t even try.
I personally found it easy (obviously after the first couple of horrendous weeks)

@NewAccount270219 Totally agree about first few days. I was falling asleep with my eyes open in the hospital. My whole body was twitching and jerking after no sleep in four days (we were in longer after section and then jaundice) even though I was forcing my eyes open so I didn't drop my baby. I ended up sobbing and begging DP to come in at 4am. He arrived at 6 and I just broke down in the middle of the ward. He took baby and I basically passed out for three hours. I never thought three hours sleep would be so rejuvenating!

I was totally unprepared for the effect sleep deprivation of that level would have on my body. In no way was I safe to drive or even look after my baby properly.

I remember when I was pregnant everyone telling me how hard it is looking after a baby and the exhaustion etc to the point I was really pissed off. I spoke to a friend who had a 1 year old and she said "yes obviously it's really hard but I have smiled more in the past year than I had in the rest of my life put together" that was the loveliest thing I had ever heard and it is 100% true!

I do think, incidentally, the 'just you wait...' stuff is always unhelpful. It's depressing if you like the stage you're in at the moment and panic-inducing if you don't to be told that it's 'all downhill from here'.

have been blessed with a good sleeper and feeder

Well there you are. Your experience is not universal. Neither was mine.

I know what you mean OP. It took us years to get a pregnancy to stick but I don’t disbelieve friends who had sex, got pregnant and had a baby 9 months later. One of those friends seems currently very pissed off that I find having a baby pretty easy. We’ve (currently at any rate) got a very easy one who feeds well and sleeps in good chunks. Every time I see her she asks how I’m not going crazy, if I ever get time to shower, how my marriage is holding up. She was the same when I was pregnant - are you hating it, you must feel awful, isn’t pregnancy the worst - and when I said I was mostly enjoying it she started saying how awful labour was and how hard breastfeeding would be. As it happened, my birth was far far worse than hers but I don’t feel traumatised by it and I don’t want to talk about it as it’s not that interesting, and I’ve found feeding relatively easy. She just seems hell bent on telling me I must be finding it worse than I am, and when I say I’m not, goes on to tell me not to get used to it as xyz will ruin it all. Well maybe, but I’m not going to waste things now by stressing anxiously about what might happen. What’s the bloody point of that?

After everything I’d been told about how horrific it all is, you’ll never sleep again, you’ll hate your husband, your body will be ruined forever, life will be shit for years to come, maybe I’m doing alright because I was warned about the potential awfulness and people did me a favour. But I wish I hadn’t worried as much and waited to see what it would be like for myself.

When other people ask how things are I now just say “she’s been easy so far and I know it’s all luck so we’ll enjoy it for as long as it lasts” because I don’t want to get into the game where people either think you’re smug or lying.

I’m giving my friend some space because for some reason, despite having had a much easier time of certain aspects than I did, she’s not happy that I’m happy and it’s pissing me off.

That’s so lovely Weevle84

I found that nothing I read or was told by others really applied to my situation. I remember having this feeling that I was in a very different place to "planet motherhood", which was where everyone else seemed to be.

It took a while for me to realise that there's an engineered world pertaining to parenthood, and it has little to no relation to most parents' lives. I still am surprised at how little practical information there is out there about babies and toddlers, and some of the research I've read about development seems to be about another species to my dd.

And it's that, I reckon, that creates the stress half the time. I'm lucky in that, due to my age and area, most of the carers of children I come across at groups and preschool are the children's grandmothers, so they've seen it all before and are remarkably laissez faire when their grandson eats powder paint.

EuGH i got the same I find my kid extremely unstressful compared to dealing with colleagues and narcissist relatives it's as hard as you make it IMO

Anne (this is lisasimpsonsbff, btw!) this is in no way to excuse your friend (who sounds quite horrible), but perhaps to explain: I suspect you make her feel like she did it wrong or was just a bit weak. I feel a lot of guilt and some shame about not enjoying the newborn phase that much, especially as DS was so very wanted, and I think other people saying how great it is does make me feel defensive. I found the poster upthread saying it must either be that I don't cope very well in life or that I had stupid expectations that I'd sleep all night quite upsetting, and it is tempting to make a barbed comment in reply - I wouldn't, and don't, and certainly not to a friend, so again that doesn't excuse your friend, but I suspect that's how she feels.

Someone I know who had HG seemed really genuinely angry that I had very little morning sickness (and generally a super easy pregnancy) - clearly that's unreasonable, but I also sort of get it. I think she felt me walking miles the day before I gave birth made everyone else think that she'd just made a fuss about nothing.

It isn't as hard as you make it @Luxembourgmama I had PND and I certainly didn't 'make' that happen. I would have given anything for a day where I didn't wish myself dead or think dd and dh were better off without me. I wanted parenthood to be as wonderful as people said it was but I felt like doing the simplest things was like walking through treacle. People said it would be worth it, but at the time it didn't feel like that at all.

British people in general like to dwell on the negatives. It's a cultural thing.

Like shallowhal I actually remember sitting with my partner and looking at our new baby and saying ‘why did nobody tell us the truth?’.

The first months are bloody difficult and I think in my pregnancy I could have done with that information. But with a bit more specificity than ‘just you wait, it’s awful’.

When I’m with somebody pregnant now I like to play ‘you’ll seeeeeee’, ie how long can i wait before somebody saying in a gleeful voice either that or ‘just wait....’. Christ, it’s like the worst game of one-upmanship ever. Who is having the worst time. NOT A COMPETITION LADIES.

So yes. Important to have a realistic expectation but not just shitty comments thrown in. ‘Enjoy every minute’ is my second favourite after ‘youlll seeeeeee’ because, let’s be honest, Aunty Joan telling me to enjoy every minute is not going to make me relish feeding my baby 26 times in 24 hours any more. It’s just going to make me feel stabby.

Also no, to the PP. PND is not the same as sleep deprivation. SD may make PND more severe or harder to cope with, but depression is not caused by, or because of, poor sleep.

This post may be a little ranty and I apologise if so 😂 It may have struck a nerve.

Meh, I personally could have done with someone mentioning to me that labours can be awful irrespective of how 'prepared' you are (my first was a stinker and it threw me), and I would also have appreciated it if someone had told me that it is not inevitable that you will feel euphoria and a flush of overwhelming love on seeing your newborn (I didn't) and that raising babies and toddlers can be intense and demanding (instead, I felt like a freak for struggling when apparently its always a lovely, lovely time and you should enjoy your baby)

For me, forewarned is forearmed

I got a very happy shiny version of birth and motherhood from friends. My experience was very different and 4 years later from the arrival of my first, I'm still exhausted and fueled by caffeine as they still don't sleep. I'm also still seeing a psychiatrist 4 years after my little psychotic break where I decided that dc1 was a doll who was spying on me and tried to leave him in NICU. Because I'd only heard good stuff, it reinforced my feeling that I was the problem, that dc1 would be better off with out me because a proper mum wouldn't have had a psychotic breakdown or would have figured out how to make him sleep or not want to feed for hours on end.

There is a fine line between scaring people and being honest.

I try to offer a balanced view - my own experience reiterated with how it's just my personal experience alongside more positive stories borrowed from friends! So the overall message is: birth can be awful but can be plain sailing, babies can be a joy from day 1 or feel like complete hell... not sure it's helpful but at least it's true :)

EuGH i got the same I find my kid extremely unstressful compared to dealing with colleagues and narcissist relatives it's as hard as you make it IMO

No, your experience may have been easier! I had twins. I had already had DS and thought we knew what we were doing with babies! Twin One bf for an hour and a half at a time, before going to sleep. Twin Two bf for ten minutes before falling asleep. How did I make it hard for myself by somehow getting Twin One to bf for an hour and a half, when I could have got her to bf for 10 minutes like her sister?

Why was Twin One an easy going, happy, compliant toddler, who had a tantrum once every ten days; while Twin Two was much more volatile, demanding and had a tantrum every day? Why did I make Twin Two so much more hard work, when I could have made her happy and easygoing?

The real answers are:

1. Twin One did not gain any weight in the last 6 weeks of the pregnancy. She weighed 5.5 lbs at birth to Twin Two’s 7lbs 4 oz, and I think Twin One had suffered malnutrition and had an overwhelming urge to make up for it! Food has always and still is of central importance to her, whereas Twin Two struggles to keep her BMI upto the healthy range!

1. Twin Two has ADD, which in girls presents as being very volatile emotionally!

When I had my daughter and was more sleep deprived than I had ever imagined and struggling so much with breastfeeding / recovering I was delighted when other mum friends reached out and said if you're feeling 'xyz' its completely normal. It's hard, you can weep and cry that is ok.
I felt a lot better knowing others felt the same and I wasn't failing or on some different parental planet to everyone else.

So now if a new Mum is pregnant, I don't go in all guns blazing saying how hard it is, but I will say if you want to breastfeed join LLL groups or local groups. Ask for help if you need it. If you feel tired get help and it's normal if you feel weepy.

I know it helped me.

Yes. And if you dare say you're coping and your baby is sleeping and feeding fine you're instantly beaten down and told it won't last long. I remember when DS was small, about 5months and a stranger commented how happy and content he was. She said 'you must have a good baby', and my sister turned to her and said 'no, she's just a good mum!'. It was the first time anyone had actually complimented my parenting instead of being negative and I've kept that mindset since. It is absolutely okay to struggle and it is also absolutely okay to sail through motherhood. I just wish people congratulated the highs as much as they point out the lows.