What no one tells you, is that becoming a Mum doesn’t come with instructions.

“You’ll just know” they say.

I’ll just know?

All I knew was that I didn’t know anything.

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I felt like I hadn’t slept in days, exhausted and alone.

Part of me wanted someone there.

Another part of me was grateful that no one was.

I didn’t want to navigate anyone else’s feelings.

Somehow I felt more at peace being alone, while I was terrified.

They don’t teach you how to love your baby – and I worried already that maybe I don’t have what she needed from me.

I didn’t even know how to pick her up properly.

So I let her sleep, because babies sleep, right?

I’m drifting in and out of sleep, constantly checking on her and finding her still out.

It wasn’t until I overheard nurses talking outside my room that I realised maybe I’m not meant to let a baby sleep.

“She hasn’t even woken her up for a feed or change and it’s been nearly 10 hours”

I knew they must have been talking about me.

It was around 11am.

The last time (and first) I’d fed her was around 1am.

This is when I realised I truly had no idea.

I already knew that I had no idea, but now I really knew.

Here I was thinking I had to wait for my baby to wake.

That she would be exhausted from birth.

When really, I should have been waking her to be taken care of.

Oh how inadequate I felt.

This poor child, saddled with a Mum that didn’t even think about how she might need me to set things in motion.

I hadn’t taken charge of anything in my life.

I let life happen.

I didn’t happen to life.

This was the moment where everything changed for me.

The moment I realised that she needed me to be more.

So I learnt.

I changed nappies, tarry tarry nappies.

I grit my teeth through every painful suckle because – no pain, no gain.

(No pain, no gain – A lesson I didn’t start to unlearn until many years later.)

Latching is like being torn apart but I tell myself it’s normal. Everyone acts normal when they do it so I just need to suck it up. (It’s a while before I learn about tongue ties)

Then they ran their tests.

I was told that the amniotic fluid had been very low and my daughter had been inside without much for a while.

She had mild jaundice and needed to be in the incubator.

I remembered the day I left to go camping. I’d been leaking in a way that I thought she was just sitting on my bladder. I even chucked a pad on to catch the slow leak.

I had no idea my waters had broken.

Just in a very undramatic, anticlimactic way.

Not like on tv at all!

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I was already so lost.

Now, just as I started to get a feel for holding this perfect little alien..

They put her in the incubator and I sit looking at her.

Not knowing what to do.

I couldn’t hold her

Feed her

Understand her

I felt useless. Except for the moments she was in my arms between sessions.

I watched as this little person with perfect little fingers and perfect little toes, lay so close but so far away.

It felt like forever, although it likely wasn’t much more than a day.

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My first visitors are mostly a blur.

There was a moment that struck inadequacy and a new mums fear into me though.

Back in the early moments when I held my firstborn to me and tried to feed her while the nurses helped her latch…

My Mum asked me if I felt that immediate love bond.

Like something snapping into place.

In that moment, I don’t know if she felt my hesitation.

My immediate thought was

“there’s something wrong with me”

I felt lost and out of my depth.

What was this overwhelming love she was talking about and why didn’t I have it?

She mentioned it again during another visit and I smiled like I knew what she meant.

How was I to say that I felt like I was falling without a parachute?

I was learning how to take care of someone who I made and I wasn’t even sure how to feel what I thought I was meant to feel.

I felt even more lost.

Like an imposter.

How could I provide for this kid if I didn’t have the basic “Mum powers”?

It wasn’t until weeks later that in a bout of tiredness I woke up terrified because she had slept through the night.

I hovered over her.

Her soft little breaths were too light for me to be sure she was alive.

So I poke her gently.

The moment she made noises in protest was the moment I knew I had nothing to worry about.

My world had crashed and burned in seconds.

A world without her felt grey and empty.

Oh yes.

This kid was loved.