Why you "can't get anything done" when you have a newborn

The biggest surprise of early motherhood

Shortly after my son was born I started meeting up with a group of local parents (well, mothers, really—but sometimes a dad or two will tag along). Once a week we and our new babies meet up in coffee shops or in parks and talk about sleep (or the lack of it), feeding and which museums have the best nursing facilities or changing tables. The topic at hand one afternoon was what had surprised us most about motherhood. “How hard feeding is” garnered many nods of ascent, as did the sentiment that any problem encountered (like a weird new bedtime struggle) could be solved by “just waiting four days” because then “you’ll have a whole new baby.” But nothing generated as many murmurs of agreement as one mother saying, “I guess what has surprised me most is just how difficult it is to do anything at all.”

Every few months on the subreddits I frequented during my pregnancy, like “r/BabyBumps” or “r/NewParents” some version of this notion would crop up. An expectant first time mother would query how it could be possible that there really is no time for exercise or showering or preparing yourself a snack—the baby sleeps, surely? Or can be held by someone else? Or put down in a bouncer, a swing or a play gym for a just few minutes? To which the answer is: Yes! Of course it can …. but it is also really not that simple. (At least at first, at least it was not for me and my baby—nor for lots of my new mom friends I see at the park and their babies, but your baby might be different etc. etc. etc.).

The obstructions to any task that requires your full attention and both hands—like showering—are plentiful. They can be grouped, for the most part, into two buckets. The first are logistical challenges. In any given given two-to-three-hour period the baby needs to eat, burp, typically be changed and sleep. Breastfeeding takes a long time, far more than you would ever imagine, perhaps an hour a session at first. (Other kinds of feeding can be equally challenging and time-consuming, just in different ways, like endless bottle and pump part washing). Once you are done with the feeding there is the burping, which takes ten to twenty minutes. That is if you can keep the baby awake long enough to burp him—newborns are prone to dozing off while eating. (Yet if you fail to burp the baby he will soon wake up, mad and gassy). Babies do sleep a lot, but they often like to sleep on people, not on things: if put down or even moved from one chest to another they very often cry. You could just let them, I suppose, but listening to them cry is unbearable in a primal, all-consuming way. And so on and so on.

A common response from the experienced mother of reddit is basically that it is hard to put into words how busy this endless string of baby-tending activities will keep you—and how hard it is to escape from the cycle of feeding and being napped on. But a picture (or diagram) at least, might help. Having graduated from “the trenches” of newborn care (my son is now a little over 3 months old) I have a little bit more time on my hands for doing silly things like making flow charts. The problem, as I experienced it, looked something like this:

There are many paths in this flow diagram of chaos that lead to one being able to do something, like take a shower. But there are also lots that do not—at least not before you must go back to feeding the baby again. In any given day you will cycle through this loop about eight to twelve times. About half of those loops are in the middle of the night and you are not making any choice other than sleep. That gives you four, maybe six, attempts to get to freedom and choose the shower path. You will probably want to choose food for at least a couple and a nap for one. Suddenly there are only two or three cycles left in which you would choose shower as your top priority and you have to get at least a little lucky to make it to that being an option.

This phase does not last forever! Gradually the time it takes to feed the baby comes down, to just ten or fifteen minutes. The probability of being able to pull off a successful transfer to the crib goes up and up (and just putting the baby down to sleep in the crib while he is still awake becomes a real possibility). The length of each “cycle” begins to stretch to three to four hours with real windows for “playtime” in which a baby can happily be set down in a bouncer or on a mat to bat at a miniature plush Paddington Bear toy for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. For me the endless hamster wheel above lasted about six weeks, then morphed into a fresh kind of struggle (instead of only wanting to sleep on human pillows my baby then had no interest in sleep at all! It turns out that can be worse!).

These are the logistical difficulties. But the second kind of “obstruction” to “doing things” is that, despite how it can sound (or look… see above!), caring for a brand new baby is far from all drudgery. Few things in life are as enjoyable as reclining with a tiny, cosy newborn asleep on your chest—even better if you have a book or a tablet loaded with episodes of Project Runway and are brought tea and biscuits by said baby’s father. Unless you are absolutely bursting for the loo it is quite appealing to stay put. Breastfeeding is relentless, exhausting and strange. But it is also kind of magic (a sentiment which I found true for much of pregnancy, too).

The impulse for the question is understandable, of course—apart from the very reasonable desire to maintain basic hygiene is the fear of the unknown. How will there be any space for me to do anything I want after the baby comes, if there is not even time for a shower? If I had been shown the above diagram before my baby arrived I am sure I would have thought it was an exaggeration—or believed the little white lie that all expectant parents tell themselves: that their baby will be different.

Yet, even if it does not feel like it at 3am with a 3 week old baby, there will be time and space for you to do things that make you feel like yourself again. It will just take time. Writing this Substack post is possible now, at three months and change, and is what I am doing to feel that way. I am a journalist by trade. For almost seven years I have written about finance and economics for The Economist. This year I am on hiatus from that gig—on Mat Leave. Instead of reporting about Wall Street I am planning to write a little bit about my experience of early motherhood here. I hope that appeals to you. If it does, please, do consider subscribing.