DH is shocked by the reality of having a newborn

[WheelieBinPrincess]

I’m not being very sympathetic.

We are both shattered, like all new parents I guess.

When we first got the baby home a couple of weeks ago, he was quite chilled (the baby was, and to an extent DH was too) he thought things were easy! Unfortunately DS hasn’t slept well at night, he’s a bit nocturnal- he’ll do 90 min stretches just 3x throughout the night so you can’t get a proper sleep. During the day he was fabulous at napping initially but he’s not great at the moment, he gets bad wind after a feed, gets uncomfortable and needs about an hour of comforting/winding.

‘I didn’t think it would be like this’ said DH yesterday

I think I cope better on the back of a night of no sleep so I’ve been doing the night shift, in the spare room with the baby, and trying to grab a few hours nap in the day, DH still has another week off work, but last night I’d had enough, I was dead on my feet, so I expressed some milk and handed over to DH.

I’ve just been into the bedroom to find DS sleeping peacefully, and DH practically rocking in a corner, ashen faced, like he has experienced a terrible and traumatic event.

I asked how he got on. ‘Not good’, he replied in shaky voice. I’ve got the baby now and he’s gone back to bed, in a strop, because I reminded him that it sounded like an entirely normal night to me.

AIBU (and possibly a bit of a martyr ?!)
But I wonder if DH pictured having a tiny baby as like having an agreeable little cat curled up in a corner, waking up for the odd feed and cuddle, letting us watch a box set of an evening and share a bottle of chianti.

Teamwork and supporting each other is essential. It's brutal. There's tired and then there's 'newborn tired'!
When I had mastitis, I had a pink hot boob. I also had blocked ducts for a while. Good that you're still expressing and giving breastmilk.

It's hard on both of you, and I'm sure if someone hasn't had any exposure to newborns before, it's really difficult to imagine how exhausting it is.

I heard that 12 weeks is the magic number. At least both my dc stopped crying so much at that age and became delightful.

But what I really wanted to say is that my dh was so stressed and sleep deprived in those early weeks that he got such a bad health scare due to stress that we had to call and ambulance on him.
So be empathetic. We are all strong in different ways, and if you can handle the nights, then maybe you soldier on and he can then help you at other times. It's all about survival during the first weeks. There's no rule book that tells you dads must do exactly the same things as mums. As long as you help each other, it's OK.

@Findahouse21

In my experience people do cope differently with lack of sleep. For instance dh can cope with no/very little sleep but can't manage broken sleep. I'm the reverse. So in the early day he would stay up til 1/2 with the baby while I went to bed at 9. We both got a chunk of sleep then. You just need to work out what suits you both and acknowledge that you might manage differently

I cannot cope with a lack of.sleep.. Obviously I did when DS was a baby but I was almost traumatised by it . Even now 17 years later I can actually feel the despair and claustrophobia I felt at not being able to sleep more than 2-3 hours at a time for almost 18 months. I wanted to die quite a lot of the time and it made DS's babyhood a torture for mer . It played a massive part in the decision not to have a second child for me.

DH on the other hand coped reasonably well without sleep . He certainly did not become an angry depressed , anxious ball of mess as I did.

Luckily DS started sleeping through the night at 18 months old and I was able to enjoy the toddler stage much more despite him not being an easy toddler either. I could cope with anything ,as long as I had had a minimum of 6-7 hours of unbroken sleep at least 4-5 times a week which was mostly possible when DS was a toddler but completely unachievable when he was a baby.

So I feel for your DH actually though I am aware that it is not the done thing on MN to be sympathetic to a man struggling with parenthood

Yeah, it's a thing. They haven't had to properly care about the baby until now - it's a bit of an abstract sort of thing until it's in their arms. Women are protecting it and being inconvenienced by it much much more.

Unfortunately DS hasn’t slept well at night, he’s a bit nocturnal- he’ll do 90 min stretches just 3x throughout the night so you can’t get a proper sleep.

Sounds amazing. My child finally slept through the night in March this year. She was 6 years and 5 months old. Me and her dad look like shit. Haha.

OP, just a further thought. If your nipples are that sore, you don't have to BF. Your baby will be fine, however you choose to feed him/her.

The big thing that made a difference with me was handing over the night feeds to XH. There are very good reasons he is now my ex husband, but he was very good at the nocturnal stuff. I was in a terrible state after DC1 (was in intensive care for a while). Once I convinced XH (yes, convinced him - took some doing, as he had principles about BF, not having boobs and all that) that BF through the night was a bridge too far, he did all the nights so I could sleep. I did all the daytimes. It worked for us. What doesn't work is one parent doing everything including at night, because therein lies resentment.

Also, XH is naturally nocturnal, which helped.

We did shifts with non sleeping baby no, 1 I would breastfeed at 9.30pm and go to bed for 2 hours and sleep. he would hold the non sleeping baby until 11.30pm and then he would go to bed and I would get up and feed her and hold her (we both worked full time even at 2 weeks old). I earned more so in a sense my sleep counted for more.

Mmy father in the 1960s did 100% of the night feeds he was a doctor and used to say he was used to being on call - but really he was being nice to my mother (once breastfeeding failed with me early on).

Or you could hire a night nanny - might be worth the big cost just to save your marriage, lives, relationship.

I love my sleep. I never thought I'd cope with a newborn, and now I'm done with babies i can't ever imagine going back. But when I was in the thick of it I DID cope because a) there was no one to come and do it for me, and b) it turns out you can't actually die from tiredness.

My point : women don't find these things any easier than men. It sucks for us too. But we get on with it because we (most of us) don't have the option of looking a bit pathetic and having our partner swoop in and deal with it all for us!

Actually @Xenia, for anyone who can afford it, a night nanny is no bad idea.

I am a nanny

@WheelieBinPrincess our baby is 8months EBF, husband still in the spare room, he simply cannot deal with broken sleep and i simply cannot deal with his moaning about it so it works better for us. I seem to be perfectly fine on very little sleep but we are all different. He will adapt, it took my husband a few months. They can help in other ways like my husband cooks dinner every night now and he is an absolute star at playing with our DS and making him laugh when he’s grouchy!
Do you want to relatch baby to the boob? BReastfeeding I think does help you get more sleep in general but some would disagree.

It’s bloody hard. A couple of weeks in, my husband suddenly stated at 2am during a particularly refluxy episode that our DS should be adopted because we had made a mistake! Of course he didn’t mean it and he is the most amazing father. But the point is, we were both sleep deprived and at the end of our tether. Newborns require you to be on your game at a time in your life when you have the least energy. Please know that it gets easier, it won’t be like this forever. Sleep deprivation is the worst (used as torture in some countries!) You will find what works and it will settle, in the meantime don’t put too much pressure on. If you spend a day in your pjs just cuddling lo then that’s a day well spent. Sounds like you are both doing an awesome job xxx

every new parent, every one is obsessed with how much sleep they get, this is universal. It is because no one is used to lack of sleep, it is a torture treatment, it is hard for some people and easier for others, fact is we all have no sleep when babies are born.
I took on the phase 'you sleep when you're dead' during my teens and again when I had babies, its the only way

DP was exactly the same. It was only after DD arrived that I realised he hadn’t been around babies in the way I had. Or children at all really. We both have nieces and nephews and friends with kids but I’d done so much more hands on stuff than him and knew how hard a newborn was. He didn’t really have a clue.

We did all the prep too but the reality hit him very hard. He got better!

I’m always amazed at how women who go back to work early somehow manage to cope with the sleepless nights.
Women who don’t cope well with no sleep somehow cope with the newborn stage.

But when it comes to men… suddenly they can’t. It’s the end of the world and they need their sleep so much you know. They don’t cope as well as their partner.
Rather they think they can escape from it and in 99% of the cases they do.

Hi OP havent read the full thread just your posts.

A HV cant diagnose tongue tie. Midwives cant diagnose tongue tie. Only a qualified tt practitioner can diagnose this. Visual check is only one part of it, they should be doing a few different checks with gloves hands to check how the baby actually moves their tongue around their mouth etc. They take various scores and combine them together to give a total score that gives an idea of severity.

I say this as someone who had issues breastfeeding both times and was assured by various people there was no tongue tie on either baby. The second baby I specifically asked midwives to double check. Both had tongue tie that needed correcting and both fed a million times better when it was done. If your feeding works for you then great but if you want to consider trying breastfeeding again, I wouldn't rely on the word of your HV

@RugCarpet22, many women are exactly in your DH situation though. They have PND, they have to deal with PTSD from the birth.
They have to deal with infections (CS etc…)
They might not deal well at all with the lack of sleep (I didn’t and made myself ill).

But somehow, women still get up. Even with severe PND, they are hospitalised with their baby. No one is ever given them a get out jail card.
So why is it that most men do? Why do we need to be compassionate and understanding when that compassion and understanding is NOT given back to us?

I’m always amazed at how women who go back to work early somehow manage to cope with the sleepless nights.
Women who don’t cope well with no sleep somehow cope with the newborn stage.

I went back very part time at 6w, and 3 days a week from 6m. It was easier in the newborn data because sleep for WORSE later on, and reached peak awful around 9m.

That period (lasting about 9m) made the new born days look like a blissful cornucopia of rest.

To echo what a few others have said..some people genuinely cannot do lack of sleep. I'm one of them. Thank GOD my husband can.

You mentioning your DH looked ashen faced when you went in the room- he sounds like me after a broken night. Just a couple and I honestly start to feel like I'm going crazy 😨 it scares me. My skin itches, I feel twitchy (like I'm on drugs), nauseous and intensely depressed. I spent most of early parenthood wanting to vomit because I was so exhausted.

This is not to diminish your needs as a newly post natal mum in any way, I promise. But not everyone can just get on with it, and if my husband had tried to force me (rather than support me and acknowledge how hard I found it), I probably would have been suicidal.

Suggestion

If wind is the key to the problem 2 possible solutions... (if they still exist)....
There's a particular bottle that has disposable bag linings... no wind mad but worked for eldest ds
also if he badly vomits with wind have a word with doc... our 2nd ds needed a little gavascon in his normal bottle.

Hope it gets better quickly

@RugCarpet22

It's hard on both of you, and I'm sure if someone hasn't had any exposure to newborns before, it's really difficult to imagine how exhausting it is.

I heard that 12 weeks is the magic number. At least both my dc stopped crying so much at that age and became delightful.

But what I really wanted to say is that my dh was so stressed and sleep deprived in those early weeks that he got such a bad health scare due to stress that we had to call and ambulance on him.
So be empathetic. We are all strong in different ways, and if you can handle the nights, then maybe you soldier on and he can then help you at other times. It's all about survival during the first weeks. There's no rule book that tells you dads must do exactly the same things as mums. As long as you help each other, it's OK.

Definitely this. And agree, play to your strengths. I am dreadful at night stuff, to my dh did the majority. I did so much more daytime care, plus kept the house running. This was more than fair as far as I was concerned

Formula feed with gaviscon sachets for the reflux was the answer to my prayers. Priority is for you as a mother as well as your child. If your boobs are so bad then your child will still thrive with formula instead.

As I was breastfeeding I did all the nights at first until babe was around 10 months. I didn't mind this as my husband did the working, a lot of the cleaning and cooking and absolutely let me sleep when the baby sleeps at all times during the day. at weekends he would take baby during the day and march me off to bed till next feed. Looking back I don't think he really understood how hard it was to do all the nights, but he just cracked on with it because that's what you have to do and he really helped and supported me.
You're other half sounds like he's expecting you to crack on with it but cutting himself a lot of slack. I think he needs to. I think he needs to get a grip and pitch in a bit more, hard or not. This time will pass and he can either have a partner who knows her partner will always have her back or a partner who may resent him for a long time for his attitude.

Maybe reading back my message I've been slightly smug and harsh. But really I don't think you are being unreasonable in what you say when he is for the majority of the time having a full night's sleep and you are not. He needs to realise how much toll that takes on your body along with birth etc.
to you both. It's bloomin hard.
I tried gaviscon with my daughter's wind and it was amazing, had to have it prescribed by GP but it really helped her when she was not sleeping well and very uncomfortable

Jeez if he thinks this bits hard he really needs to toughen up 😆speaking as the mother of two teenagers! Sorry but tell him to grow a pair. You’ve carried the baby for 9 months & safety delivered the baby into the world. You need to eat well, rest & recover or it will affect your health & your milk supply.