6 Lessons I've Learnt in 9 Months of Motherhood

Hi everyone

How are you all? I hope you are having a good week so far. As it's Wednesday Sienna and I are going be enjoying our mini-weekend (I don't work Wednesdays anymore - yay! - so it's our weekly girly date day 😊)

Sienna turned 9 months yesterday and to mark the occasion, this week I wanted to share a few lessons with you that I have learnt in that time.

Trust

Trust your child – they will let you know when they are hungry; they will not let themselves starve. I found this one a particularly hard lesson to learn and, truth be told, I am still very much a student in the school of “Trust your Child”. Sienna wasn’t (and still isn’t) one for routine in that before she started weaning and was solely on milk, she would never have milk at the same time each day, or even vaguely at the same time. The time changed, the amount changed; I didn’t know what to expect at each feed. I’m not sure if most babies have a routine when it comes to milk/sleeping/naps etc but I spoke to quite a few people who seemed to say that their little one would have milk/sleeps at roughly the same time each day.

So Sienna not having a routine put me - someone who likes to know where, when, what time and for how long – slightly on edge because I was playing by someone else’s rule book. It wasn’t a control thing……..OK it was a control thing, but only because I wanted to make sure she was getting enough milk and, as her mummy, I thought I knew better than she did when she needed milk and how much. Turns out that it was actually her who knew herself best!! So these days it’s Sienna who calls the shots and I just have to get used to it.

Patience

Something else I’ve learned is the art of patience. I am not…..no, scrap that……I was not a patient person. But trying to get a tired baby to sleep when all they want to do is fight it and stay awake crying because they’re so tired, instilled a level of patience in me that I never before would have thought possible. Sometimes the gift of patience desserts me, but for the most part I think I’ve cracked it.

Appreciation

I have also learnt the skill of appreciation. I spoke very briefly about re-framing negatives in this post but I didn’t expand on it. These days, instead of wishing that Sienna hadn’t woken in the middle of the night for a feed (which she only started doing at 8 months so it was a bit of a shock to the system when our sleep started getting interrupted), I appreciate the fact that I get to cuddle her at 4am while she has her milk – a cuddle I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten had she not woken up.

Taking this one stage further I recognise that the language I use can have a direct effect on how I feel about a particular situation. So rather than saying “I have to get up at 4am to feed Sienna”, I think about how lucky I am that I get to get up at 4am and feed Sienna. That luxury isn’t afforded to everyone in life and I am one of the lucky ones that gets to enjoy that. Yes, I might be tired the next day but feeling tired is a small price to pay for the feeling of total and utter love and adoration I feel when I look down at her sleepily drinking her milk.

Empathy

This was a tough lesson because it took me a while to realise the lesson was even there to be learnt.

I’ll be honest, Sienna’s crying frustrated me when she was little. Logically there was nothing wrong with her, so why was she crying? And then I realised a number of things, all of which affected how I reacted/felt about Sienna’s crying.

1. I was trying to reason with a baby.
2. I was expecting too much from her. I wanted Sienna to understand and realise that when she was hungry she would be fed, when she needed her nappy changing it would be changed, when she was tired she could sleep, and that she didn’t need to scream if her need wasn’t met within a millisecond of her letting me know something needed attending to. And then I mentally punched myself in the face, reminded myself she was a baby and haven’t thought anything of the sort since!
3. I was being selfish. I wanted Sienna to stop crying for my sake. But then I realised that what she was going through, whatever reason it was she was crying, was so much worse for her than it was for me. There she was, in the arms of her mummy, and all she knew was that her mummy wasn’t doing anything to make her feel better. But when I started showing a bit of compassion and started to think about how I would feel if there was something wrong with me and I had no way of communicating it other than to cry, it was like a switch had been flicked inside of me and all I wanted to do was make her feel better, to take away whatever pain it was that was causing her to cry like that. I wanted her to stop crying, sure. But the difference now was that I wanted her to stop crying because that would mean she felt better. I didn’t matter. She was all that mattered.

It’s said that the way you react to something is a reflection of you and not of the person you’re reacting towards. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I can fully appreciate the truth in this. The reality is that when Sienna was crying and I felt frustrated, I was frustrated in and with myself because I couldn’t, and didn’t know how to, calm her down. It was absolutely nothing to do with her.

These days I am much better equipped mentally to handle the crying and that, really, is half the battle. Of course, the other half of the battle is figuring out what’s actually wrong!

It’s the little things

This one makes me particularly sad, but in a poignant way. I think about how easy it is to make Sienna laugh at the moment; grabbing her hand and saying “gotcha”, or playing peek-a-boo with her, or pretending to bite her ear, or…….oh the list is endless. But I know that one day it won’t be as easy to make her laugh so, while I can, I’ll make the most of the little things in life like hand-grabbing and peek-a-boo and store those giggles in my memory bank.

Work-in-progress

I’ve also learnt that as a mother I am a work-in-progress and I think I always will be. This isn’t a road I’ve travelled down before and with every step I take I am breaking ground, heading into unknown territory. Each day brings a new challenge, a new lesson and a new opportunity to be a better mother than the one I was the day before.

I have learnt that I am enough. I know I am not a perfect mother, but I am perfect for Sienna and that’s all that matters.

What did parenthood teach you?

I hope you enjoyed reading today’s post and hopefully you’ll be back here next week for another article but in the meantime, I hope the rest of your week, and weekend, are great.