The truth about newborns

Something wonderful has happened in the past week.  It seemed to happen quite suddenly and I can pinpoint the precise moment when I first noticed it.  Five or six nights ago, in the middle of the night, shortly after I had finished nursing and changing the twins, as I was putting Eva back into her velcro swaddler, she smiled at me. She looked directly at me and her whole face lit up in an unmistakable expression of baby joy, a joy that I truly felt had something to do with me.  In the days that have followed, I have detected in both Liam and Eva a blossoming awareness of the world around them and, in particular, an increasing awareness of us.  And now that it's happened, I feel that I can finally be more honest about what it's been like up until this point.


An online acquaintance of mine whose son is a week younger than Liam and Eva is struggling with postpartum depression.  The other day I told her that, since becoming a parent, I found it nothing short of miraculous that we didn't all suffer from postpartum depression.  After the initial exhilaration of a successful delivery and those first moments of seeing your newborn wear off, parenting that newborn is really an unrewarding job.  Despite the baby books' claims that a newborn recognizes his mother from having heard her voice in the womb, and claims that newborns have an innate attraction to faces, I saw little evidence of it.  Liam and Eva seemed no more interested in looking at me than they did in looking at the ceiling.  For the first many weeks, newborns sleep, poop, and eat, flail their limbs about aimlessly, and direct their gaze seemingly at random.  When they decide they are hungry, they cry furiously, angrily.  They have five states of being: asleep, quiet alert, fussy, angry, and in the depths of despair.  Newborns may smile on occasion, but only in what appears to be a response to internal stimuli, known to many parents as "gas smiles". The first many weeks of parenthood are spent in a sleepless stupor catering to an ungrateful little being (or two ungrateful little beings...) who seems no more interested in you than he is in the wall, and less interested in you than the sensation of gas percolating in his bowels.  So how is it that any of us survive that initial period of parenting without becoming depressed?  If you're me, you get through those weeks by developing a sense of humor about baby farts, by taking satisfaction in watching your baby grow (much as you would congratulate yourself on cultivating an herb garden), by accepting the attention and compliments of strangers and, more than anything, by knowing that everything will get vastly better soon.

For me, that "vastly better" began with that first beaming smile from my daughter and has been steadily building ever since.