MUMMY MANIA: The guessing game

IN spite of all the books and websites and anecdotes from family and friends, a newborn baby is like a complicated piece of flat-pack IKEA furniture with no instruction manual for assembling it.

Take breastfeeding, for example. The midwives in the hospital and the public health nurse give lots of good advice, help to get you started and tell you how amazingly well you are managing. Then the training wheels are taken away and you find yourself alone at 3 a.m. facing a non-talking, red-faced, mewling baby.

Have they had enough? Have they had any at all? Is that breast empty? Should I try the other one? What if it’s not empty? Will it fill again properly? Did I just use the same breast twice…and on and on the guessing game goes.

Then there is The Crying. He has slept, he has eaten and winded and still he wails, insisting you carry him endlessly from room to room. It is not enough to be colic but it is just enough to make your tired, frayed nerves jangle. And then you check his nappy and you wonder how you could have missed it? You tell yourself that next time you will check that first but of course next time, it’s not that!

But why is it such a guessing game? Women have been having babies since the beginning of time (presumably, unless it was men originally and after a few goes they looked at each other and said, ‘ah this is madness, lads, let’s make the women do it’). I can only think of the two most obvious answers – no two babies are the same and they cannot tell you what is wrong or what they need…oh, and breasts don’t come with gauges.

During those first few months when my head was cloudy anyway I had the constant feeling that every time I felt the answer was just within my grasp and I was just about to master one thing, someone out there moved the goalposts.

I suppose it is all part of starting a new job - one you have little training in, bar a crash course, and one you feel you got on false pretences. You are left having to wing it and guess at what exactly you are supposed to be doing and how to do it. Only this is no game.

* Mummy Mania – dairy of a first-time mum, is a monthly blog, written by Barbara Daly, Louisburgh, published in the print edition of The Connaught Telegraph