Gutted about rubbish newborn stage

[Creamcakesandpastries]

I found the newborn stage with DD1 (now 2 years, 9 months old) really hard and kind of wished it away with constant thoughts of ‘just get through this bit and it’ll get easier when…’ . All I remember is cluster feeding (EBF on demand, same this time), bad sleeping and general grumpiness. When pregnant with DS2, knowing we are very unlikely to have any more children after him and always having felt so sad about the failed newborn stage with his sister, I vowed I would try my hardest to try to enjoy him as a newborn. I was hoping for a nice calm baby and that cuddly ‘newborn bubble’ people talk about. Well he is 4 weeks old now and I am finding it really miserable again. Whenever he is awake he screams (and I mean screams) for a feed, he sleeps a decent amount through the day but only 1-2 hour stints at night. He screams throughout every nappy change and throws himself around crying and rooting like mad while being winded, always wanting to go back on the breast until he falls asleep. When he does fall asleep I transfer him to his moses basket and he sleeps a bit, then wakes up furiously screaming looking for a feed again. There’s no calm cuddling or singing/ talking to him, just feeding or sleeping or screaming. I feel like I am always going to feel a sort of hole in my life where these early days with my babies should have been. I feel a pang of envy when I hear other people talk about lovely cosy times with their newborns, and I also feel like both kids and I are missing out because I am scared to leave the house due to never knowing how long he will sleep and how awful, urgent and impatient his scream is when he wakes up looking for a feed. I don’t think he needs to see the doctor or anything, I think it’s kind of just cluster feeding and I do just need to get through it. But how do I get over this sense of loss that I will never feel positive about these short and precious early days?

@fairgame84 I feel you too, it's bloody hard and social media doenst help. I also deleted Facebook for a detox and I doubt I'll go back on to be honest x
I think it's just a time to get through - that's what I'm telling myself anyway

Swaddle, dummy and a bottle so it’s not all on you. Being the only one who can feed the baby is beyond exhausting.

Not one person who has ever had a baby has told me about 'lovely newborns' or how ever it is worded

Each person has their own story with the good and bad bits, no consistency at all

Just to add to all the voices, I hated the newborn stage.

With DS1 I had this false expectation that you describe wanting. The reality was hating breastfeeding, hating sleepless nights, finding it difficult to bond etc. he is 3 now and I LOVE the toddler stage. I adore him so much and the more he started doing, the more I loved it.

With DS2 I had my expectations firmly adjusted and enjoyed it a little more, but only because it is a short lived phase and I new it would be over soon. He's 18 months now and adorable

It gets better OP and don't beat yourself up

I found the newborn stage much easier once I stopped trying to breastfeed exclusively. Probably not popular advice here, but could be worth a go for your happiness.

Your answer pretty much says formula is the answer, though?

With my dc1, we had problems feeding and needed to combi feed for a while, just like you.

Dc2 was born and fed without problems. Which just goes to show that everyone's different and what's right for one person won't necessarily be right for another.

I feel you OP. My DD was a miserable baby, she had reflux and was forever crying and vomiting. No lovely newborn cuddles, it was just puke and screaming, she never slept more than 30 minutes in the first 6 months and I felt like I was dying some days I was so tired. She wouldn't bf so I combo fed for a while then FF from around 3 months with gaviscon to help the reflux (no magic bottle = sleep, it was just as bad!) so I had the added guilt of not EBF.

DS came along and I braced myself for the same again... he bf like a dream, sleep wasn't great again but he wasn't constantly crying and puking on me so it was slightly easier. He was born just before lockdown so any hope of the newborn bubble was shattered with home schooling and everything else lockdown brought.

I do feel sad that I never had the cuddly, relaxed newborn stage. But it's relentless and it's ok to say that. It's ok to find it hard and no mum should be judged for saying that.

Fwiw, I find 3+ to be so much better than the baby stage. 3 is where their little personalities really come out, you can have (weird, jumbled, hilarious, confusing) conversations and things generally get easier as they get more independent.

For it was the answer to that particular aspect. There are pros and cons to everything though. The faff of bottles, sterilising, washing stuff etc is one downside. Nothing is perfect.

This sounds very familiar to my DS2. I didn't produce enough milk and he was constantly hungry.

We switched to breast pump + formula and never looked back. He gained weight really quickly and became much more content.

I feel you, the newborn stage is so hard with hormonal changes, sleep deprivation and constant breastfeeding. I cried every day for 3 weeks! I do think EBF had a lot to do with it for me, and I will 100% be combi feeding if I have another. 20 mins on each side then top up with formula while I use a hands free pump!

that 1st 6 weeks with a newborn is pretty difficult. It will pass, OP. Savour the good moments when you have them, however brief.

Hi op, I have a 5 week old so just ahead of you in that sense, congratulations on your wee bundle. I also have a baby who hates being put down, screams to be fed very regularly and who won't sleep longer than 2 hrs at night. However, I just remind myself that he's doing a great job of being a baby just like yours is. He's crying to communicate because he depends on me to not let him starve and hunger at this age is (to baby) a potentially life threatening thing. He has no control over his windy pains and he sleeps so briefly because im breastfeeding, he needs to stay hydrated and its reducing the risk of sids by him waking so often. It's brutal for me in terms of no sleep and no breaks but it won't last forever so I'm just reminding myself that he needs my help to settle, that I'm using this time to prove I'm his safe place and take the little cute moments when you can. If you're finding it too much and it's affecting your mental wellbeing speak to your hv. Could be a bit of post natal depression, or it could just be that you need someone to step up and help give you a rest. Can you express a bottle so someone can do a night feed for you so you can sleep for a good block? I do 3 bottles a week extra so my dh can step in when I'm really struggling and I feel like a different person after a solid 4-5 hrs sleep away from baby. What you're feeling is normal but you need to talk to the people around you to get a bit more rest. And as pps have said, lose the expectations. If everyone is alive at the end of the day that was alive at the start, then you've succeeded and done your bit. I also find that when mine is really unsettled and it's a bad day, snuggle up in bed with a movie and skin to skin, let your oh watch the other kids or get them babysat. You're doing a great job just don't put as much pressure on yourself to feel a certain way.

The newborn stage is tough op, do t beat yourself up. It sounds like you're doing a great job in a hard situation.

Laughing at 'rest bite' I think the word previous posters are after is 'respite'!

The cuddly newborn bubble that people talk about is complete bullshit. Those people are living in a delusional fantasy land. They're either lying or putting a brave face on it, are swamped with hormones which mask the actual hardness of the situation or they're bottle feeding a baby who sleeps all the time and who will be fed by someone else at times so the mum can engage in self care / sleep. If you have an EBF baby who doesn't take a bottle or (like mine) you cannot use a breast pump to express milk then you're suffering tortuous levels of sleep deprivation and absolutely no time to shower/ play with older child / do anything other than feed all the time. The cluster feeding sessions are absolutely horrendous. I remember a really brutal session which lasted from 6pm until 4am one night and I'd lost my mind by 4am and felt like a rabid animal. My baby is now almost 1. I am counting down the days until I can stop breastfeeding (literally going to stop as soon as 12 months and nightwean).

An example :
My neighbour had a baby 2 months after me and we bumped into each other at a local cafe when my baby was 3 months old and hers was 1 month old. I was on the edge. I was so tired, stressed and feeling low. During our conversation she said that everything was "wonderful" and that they whole experience was "magical". I remember feeling so awful at hearing this that I ran off to the toilets and sobbed my heart out because that's not how I felt. Fast forward 5 years, our daughters are now friends and she hasn't had a second baby because she found it brutally difficult. But in that moment she was telling everyone how magical it was.

I work in a role where I see a lot of new mothers and their babies. When I was pregnant for the first time, I said to my dh that our mantra was going to be "it could be worse" - that, whatever our newborn was like (and you have so little control over that!), we would tell ourselves that they could be screaming even more or sleeping even less etc.
For us that worked.
With our first there were moments of serenity and cuddliness amongst the chaos. With subsequent children there definitely were not many of those moments.
But it helped us to think of it as better than the worst it could have been if that makes sense.

(I don't see/hear as many people saying it nowadays but 20 years ago there was a big expectation that birth experiences should be positive all the time. A lot of people spent the first couple of years mourning the loss of this perfect experience they should have had. I think this sounds similar. Nothing about parenthood is perfect all the home. It's worth it - in most people's opinions - but it's never not hard work except for very brief very occasional moments).

Oh and the rose tinted glasses are totally a thing. I have very fond memories of my first newborn stage - but I still remember being shocked that 6 weeks wasn't a magic button to make things easier. And for my second I was ready for the trickier stage to last 12 weeks - so I know thinking back that I must have been longing for time to pass...
I wish I'd read about the 4th trimester beforehand as I think it would have helped me.

Interested in hat lots of people suggesting to offer a bottle. First time round I was dead set on EBF. It was tough and this time round I still wanted to breastfeed but very happy to supplement with bottle of expressed milk/formula if it meant I got a smidge more sleep. Everyone seemed to talk about it like a silver bullet.

Well I guess I'm learning that when it comes to babies, there are no silver bullets. Baby won't take a bottle, we've been trying nearly every day for 4 weeks. How do people do this?!

We used Philips Avent bottles with the appropriate teats for the baby's age.

DS1 had really bad reflux with Cow & Gate, which seemed to be very 'foamy'. We switched to Aldi own brand which is, apparently, made in the same Irish factory as Aptimel and Cow & Gate.

You have to start from the beginning. The more ingrained habits become the harder they are to change. DD had an expressed bottle from day 1 so had no problems switching between the two. Not very helpful for you now I know!

The newborn stage was terrifying and awful. It was easier in comparison to now having a 19 month old tearing the place up, but definitely the most joyless stage for me. I love being a mum now.

My eldest was a newborn from hell apart from fairly decent overnight sleeping. She screamed all the time and I found it distressing tbh, I had never been around babies and already had a history of poor mental health, and got PND.

My second wasnt too difficult a newborn luckily, didn't cry much as a newborn as long as he was breadtfed on demand. He wouldn't really nap longer than about 30 mins at a time and mostly contact napped on me following feeds as a newborn. I got used to doing everything things one-handed, I even used to follow 3 yo DC1 around at playgroup whilst breastfeeding DC2 for example, when I had to. He actually became a much more difficult baby at around the 4 months mark when he didn't want to breastfeed all day anymore but replaced most of those hours with crying as he still wouldn't nap properly, so that was hard too.

I'm not a newborn person, for me the newborn phase is a period to get through. Many people find this to the the case, you're really not alone.

That's normal for most newborns surely, DSis is only getting one hours sleep at a time. Even my kitten wakes me up every 2 hours wanting a cuddle or to play or something.
I'm not sure anyone can enjoy anything if they are getting no sleep.

I just wanted to say thank you for this thread which has given me some reassurance during my own newborn crapness
OP, if you see this, how are you getting on now?

Have you thought about keeping a little diary? This will help you look back at this time with accuracy - you can note down the hard bits but also the fleeting nice bits, thoughts and feelings. Paper or an app, just brief bullets when you remember.