Journaling through the newborn phase
No matter how long, complicated or easy the labour, giving birth is strenuous on your body! And it doesn’t end there, with the arrival of a new tiny human. Your body has been running marathons for months, survived the final leg… and now, it has to keep this little person alive. If you choose to breastfeed, it feels like the marathon continues: sleepless nights, a baby that constantly wants to drink and in our case, a toddler who got his 10h of sleep a night and therefore is super fit at 7am every morning!
Even though breastfeeding is the most natural thing, I believe that it doesn’t always come naturally. It requires learning (for both mommy & baby), accepting and a lot of patience.
For me, just like pregnancy, it was a different journey with both kids. This time round, we were off to a good start, but hit a rough patch around week 4, which included a lot of sleepless nights. It ended in a lot of chaos, frustration, crying and finally a long and helpful chat with a lactation consultant. But what did get me through this whole period, from the struggles of having a newborn and recovering of the birth, to the sleepless nights and challenges of breastfeeding, was journaling.
With the second baby, it felt much easier to let me husband just be in charge for a little bit while I took a break. In the past year, I have reflected a lot on my self-care and started to enjoy journaling again (after a very long break - the last time I journaled probably dates back to my teenage years). I knew it was something that helped me get through more difficult days and often I did find that it sparked some new ideas about how to handle the current challenges or how to refocus my goals. So this time, after the birth I committed to a daily journaling practice. I made sure I sat down with a pen and paper - and at times a sleeping baby on my left arm - and just wrote.
And in this particular period of my life, I could clearly see the benefits of journaling. It helped me find calm and focus, gain more patience and find ideas to resolve the challenges we were facing. We still had an active toddler and an unsettled newborn at home and it was hard. There were tears, there was screaming, there was frustration. But at the same time, by taking a break to journal and be present, I saw more of the little moments of joy that you are likely to miss in your everyday life and I felt just a little bit more patient with myself and my family.