please help me i am rubbish

[chibi]

my baby is 15 weeks old and I am the worst mother. I can't get her to nap unless i feed her to sleep, likewise at night. I am the only mother I know whose baby won't sleep through the night. She will do a 5 hour blockif i am really lucky, more likely a 3 hour one, and atimes is up every hour.

I am the only mother whose baby needs constant attention/holding, everone elses baby can just be plonked down and left.

When she was first born I felt like I was getting to understand her and feeling like I could maybe be a good mother but not anymore. I have read so many books and tried out all their advice, none of it works for me, maybe i'm doing this wrong too.

i used to reassure myself by telling myself that these are all phases, she'll grow out of it, now I just think that i will inevitably find some new area of her development to screw up.

i feel at my wits end today, she's been crying nonstop from noon and nothing is helping.

That's the thing with these groups. Everyone's keeping up appearances. At the start I was crying most days, DD wouldn't ever be put down and I seemed to spend all day listening to her scream in my ear. I thought everyone else had it together they always looked so good. Then one day one of the mums I was most in awe of phoned me up in tears to ask what I was doing right as she thought I looked sorted! As if.
Just recently I discovered that the mum who claimed her LO slept through from 8 weeks meant midnight til 5am!
Mumsnet is so much more real than RL IYSWIM

Agree with mamadoc. People on MN tell it like it is! I never told anyone in RL that I cried every day for 6 weeks after ds1 was born, was driven demented by his constant ( normal!) demands and was rarely out of my dressing gown before 3pm. And that I would go to the local pharmacy and buy things I didn't need just for a chat with the nice staff! No MN back then you see!

Of course you're not a rubbish mother. Your child is a genius that's all. Well, that's a bit flippant, but some babies are just like that and it often comes with high intelligence. I believe in going with your child if you possibly can: it's easier than changing their nature.

If you like books, here's a couple of recommendations from someone whose baby was just the same: The Fussy Baby Book by Bill and Martha Sears - or failing that anything else by them. What Mothers Do by Naomi Standen.

Oh and get a sling, learn to use it and keep baby close to you instead of trying to plonk her down. It will help her development and you will feel like a fabulous mummy. Who cares if the other babies sit dumbly in the corner staring while their mums chat - yours will be right in the action.

And once you get out of the mindset of training a baby to be good and quiet in the corner, you can instead enjoy your baby being loud and manic right in your face and in other people's faces too (which is where babies should be in my opinion).

Take DD everywhere, to parties and friends houses and whatnot and let her be part of your life. If she doesn't sleep, she can stay up. If she wants to feed, just let her. If she's anything like my DS - and she sounds very similar - she'll respond better to this treatment, you'll all have fun together and she'll eventually, eventually, learn to be really independent, confident and brilliantly social with all types of people. My DS is now nearly 2, fabulous, and although he was really clingy for a really long time, he's not now and he's brilliant in every social situation I've yet taken him to.

I think it's more fun this way, though definitely completely and utterly hard work.