Mark, 10 Weeks and 5 Days

I step into the room and take a look at baby Mark, all ready for bedtime.

“Why did you pick that pyjama?” I ask Feng.

“Too small?”

“Not yet, but remem­ber the last time he wore it? He didn’t want to go to sleep,” I explain, while undress­ing Mark. “That pyjama is bad luck.”

Case closed. I’m chang­ing Mark. Feng shrugs but doesn’t object. Hell, we are both exhausted and we don’t want to risk jinx­ing it.

Yes, I am aware of the fact that chang­ing Mark’s pyjama won’t guar­an­tee that he will fall sleep faster. I know that he prob­a­bly doesn’t give a damn about the clothes he is wear­ing, that it has no influ­ence on his sleep what­so­ever. That I’m becom­ing a super­sti­tious fool.

With a baby comes a sense of loss of con­trol over your life. And these silly super­sti­tions or rou­tines we fol­low allow us to gain a sense of con­trol back.

That’s my best expla­na­tion for our quirks.

It all starts when you become preg­nant. A won­der­ful thing is hap­pen­ing: you are bak­ing a mini-baby. But at the same time, you are some­what los­ing con­trol over your body. You are shar­ing it with said mini-baby, which is a strange expe­ri­ence. You also start devel­op­ing symp­toms you never had before, such as morn­ing sick­ness, sud­den and unex­plain­able food aver­sions and crav­ings, extreme tired­ness, mood swings… Being preg­nant is a tough job and can be dif­fi­cult phys­i­cally and men­tally. I com­pared it to going through puberty all over again!

But after the baby is born, you do get your body back… right? Ah ah, not so fast! If you are breast­feed­ing, you will be lend­ing a boob or two for a lit­tle while. It also takes time for your period to come back, for your baby belly to dis­ap­pear, for the uterus to shrink back to its nor­mal size, for any dull birth pain to ease. Don’t expect all that to hap­pen overnight and all at once—every woman and every body is dif­fer­ent. I had it easy at the post­par­tum stage and my body recov­ered very fast but post­par­tum issues can be understated.

Mean­while, you are deal­ing with a mini-earthquake at home: the baby. You waited for nine months to meet him (and some­time much longer if con­ceiv­ing took a while) but no mat­ter how pre­pared you think you are… you won’t be ready for what’s ahead. All babies are dif­fer­ent and with babies, every day is dif­fer­ent too. You can’t plan, can’t anticipate—you have to go with the flow.

Eas­ier said than done.

Dur­ing the first few weeks, estab­lish­ing a rou­tine is mis­sion impos­si­ble. The baby will eat when­ever he feels like it and sleep when­ever he wants to. On the plus side, there is never a dull moment and you are kept on your toes. On the down­side, you are tired, you’d love to be able to find time to eat or sleep with­out being inter­rupted for a feed­ing and you can’t wait to get out of the house to see if the world is still spinning.

At first, some days are per­fect and some days are awful. And good luck try­ing to fig­ure out what trig­gers these hell­ish day: the baby can be hun­grier than usual because of a growth spur, moody because of the weather (Mark went crazy dur­ing Hur­ri­cane Sandy!) or because he is over­tired, because the par­ents are stressed out, because the snow is white and the sky is blue—who knows.

Once you elim­i­nated the obvi­ous rea­sons (hunger, tired­ness, sick­ness) you are left alone try­ing to fig­ure out why the baby won’t calm down.

And yes, at this stage you may change his pyjama claim­ing it’s “bad luck” in a point­less attempt to regain some kind of con­trol of an out-of-control situation.

With babies, what works one day doesn’t work any­more the next. Things are con­stantly chang­ing, evolv­ing, and you have to adapt.

It’s tough. I’m far from being a con­trol freak and Feng and I aren’t rou­tine peo­ple; yet I often wished we had it all fig­ured out with Mark. But there is no magic for­mula for babies—just a good dose of com­mon sense, con­sis­tency and patience.

Embrace chaos, enjoy the moments.

And change that pyjama. Who knows, maybe it is bad luck.