The First Year
How Our Expectations Shape Our Experience
With a doubt, one of the many reasons I struggled so much in that first year was because of the high bar I had set for myself. I had committed to returning to work after my baby was born while I was still pregnant, and the idea of not upholding my word was unacceptable to my reputation.
I was use to being self sufficient and independent, these qualities I held about myself were not easily let go of. I thought that made me strong willed, powerful, and brave… I wanted to be all things, to all people, and couldn’t see past this wall.
The time I had preparing for the baby included months of reading a new parenting book each week, taking online and live classes on every topic available, researching every aspect of childbirth and new baby care I could think of for hours on end, researching and reading product reviews of every baby item under the sun and then scouring Craigslist for deals and driving all over a 100 mile radius to get the rest bargains.
I prepared my body physically for labor and birth with Pilates, strength training, exercises on the birthing ball, stretches, stretch mark prevention creams, the list goes on…
What I had not done was any inner work. Mentally preparing myself for the journey ahead, for motherhood, for the identity transformation.
These types of classes or books too easily slip through the cracks or just don’t make the cut for time with all the things a soon-to-be-mother feels she must do to prepare for the new arrival.
Yet, the assumptions and expectations we place on ourselves, our child, our situation for that first year can have a monumental impact on the experience of that first year.
We form our beliefs and ideas about how we think that first year should and will go, based on a multitude of factors: stories we hear from our own parent’s first year experience with their children, our friend’s experience of it, books, the media, the list goes on again.
I encourage soon-to-be parents to take time before the child arrives to share, explore, and discuss their beliefs and expectations for that first year with precision and gentleness, and then let them go.
Because parenthood affects each person differently, there’s no telling how one person will feel upon seeing/holding/hearing/being with their new baby for the first time. From those first few moments of bonding with the new baby; parents are thrown into an ever present internal dance between the person they once were — and their new self as a parent; and it can be likened to a state of enlightenment when the two of those states are able to merge together seamlessly in both thought and action.
