On My Heart: My Baby is Not A Robot

I am what you call a Type A personality. I like organization, routine, predictability and efficiency. I enjoy process and maps and clear patterns. I make to do lists. I clean my house the same way every week. 

I do not have any sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior, but I am wired to be a little more meticulous than is probably normal. I have always been this way as an adult. It's my Achilles heel - I like to control my environment.

So having a baby threw a grenade into my way of life. The entire first month there was no routine, nothing was predictable and I was the least efficient I have ever been in my adult life. Although I had read every baby book under the sun, there was no clear "map" on how to raise my daughter. It was a storm of exhaustion, spit up, poop, pee and tears. I could hardly remember to brush my hair or eat breakfast. And it drove me crazy. 

I did not have postpartum depression. I had postpartum anxiety. And what I thought would help with it, actually made it worse - my Baby Connect app.

A few days before Brighton entered into the world, I purchased the Baby Connect app for my iPhone. As I said here, it tracks anything and everything you could want for your baby, provides analytical charts and even sets alarms if you need them. From the very first real nursing session and diaper, Brighton's every diaper, meal and sleep time has been tracked. 

During the first month of her life, when I lived in a haze of her tiny new life, I hung onto my iPhone like it was a lifeline. I could track what she did and then compare it to what the pediatrician and lactation consultant told me. I didn't have to remember what side she nursed on last. I could easily spout out numbers and figures about how many wet diapers she had in one day, one week or one month. 

As she grew older and her sleep, eating habits and bodily functions became more stable, I started to look for patterns in the numbers. I studied her day by day, seeing how many more times I would need to nurse her in order for her to get within a range of the day before; or how many total hours she had slept. 

My anxiety came to a small standstill in the middle of all of this. She became somewhat predictable. I could easily read her cues when she was hungry or tired, or know when she would need a diaper change without even checking. We had a shell of a routine and it worked well. She was happy, I was happy and my anxiety seemed to be gone permanently.

Then Brighton turned three months old and all that predictability changed. In the span of one week, she went through a massive growth spurt and we took an out of town trip (the week I went to Arkansas) that threw her off what cycles she had. Instead of eating every 2.5-3 hours, she was now eating every 2 and was so distracted during our sessions that she would cry in frustration. Instead of napping 1.5 hours in the afternoon, she was sleeping only 40 minutes at a time. She had a hard time falling asleep at night and was waking at 3am ready to nurse. The routine I had for her naps and bedtime didn't settle her down like it had before. 

During that week I would look at my Baby Connect app and feel my heart start to race with worry - everything I knew about my child the week before was now gone. She was a totally different baby and I was stressed not knowing how much she should now be eating, or sleeping, or even acting. The charts and the graphs and the numbers were all over the place. 

One night as I was nursing her, I looked at the app and counted how many minutes she had eaten that day versus the day before. I felt myself tense up as I realized it was 10pm at night and she needed one more feeding to get within her "normal" range before she'd go to bed that night. My eyes welled up with tears and I felt my jaw clench up. I could feel a headache come on almost immediately and I started praying that God would somehow, supernaturally, help my daughter fall asleep easily that night without that last feeding.

And do you know what I heard as I silently cried and prayed? I heard the words, "Your baby is not a robot."

I don't know if it was God, or just my own brain telling me that. Regardless it was my "duh" moment in the haze of my anxiety. Brighton is not a robot and I was convicted to stop treating her like something that could be tracked and measured. She is not always going to be predictable because she is a baby - every month she is making massive developmental leaps and changing physically, mentally and even emotionally. She will not always respond to routine and she will not be efficient at anything for some time. No matter what I did, or didn't do, I could not control her. I had to let go.

I had convinced myself that if I could provide a sense of my Type A tendencies in my job as her mother, my anxiety would be kept at bay. Ironically, it made it worse. 

It took me a few weeks to transform from a ball of stress into a normal human being again. I still felt my jaw clench up as I watched the clock to make sure she was nursing close to the "average" time. I still found myself looking at those patterns and graphs in the app. I had to tell myself to relax when I fed her and when I laid her down for naps. I had to remind myself to stop boxing her in by counting all that she does on a daily basis; to stop trying to control her.

The postpartum anxiety went away eventually. I still feel it rear it's ugly head in days when she doesn't nap or eat well, when she is just having an "off" day as all humans do. But most of the worry is gone and I am thankful. Instead of measuring her, I am just enjoying her.