To Everyone Who Told Us We'd Love Every Minute
The line that was supposed to make us feel grateful, and what we actually needed to hear at 3:14 a.m.
Mia was crying in the kitchen at 3:14 a.m. Not the new-parent tears we'd been warned about. The kind where your face goes flat, you don't move for two minutes, and then you start again.
It was week four. The baby had been screaming for two hours. Sam was sitting on the floor of the nursery with him, swaying. I was supposed to be sleeping. Instead I was googling "is it normal to wish I hadn't" with the phone tilted down so the brightness wouldn't reach the bedroom.
This is the part nobody tells you about. So we want to say it.
「The line」
To the in-law who said, "These are the days you'll miss."
To the friend who looked at the photo and said, "Soak it all in."
To the lactation consultant who said, "Just enjoy this stage."
To the strangers at Trader Joe's, the women at the pediatrician's office, the grandparents at the playground who looked at our hollow eyes and our half-buttoned shirts and said it, again and again, like a benediction:
You'll love every minute.
You meant well. We know you meant well. But you also weren't there at 3:14.
「Why this line is the problem」
There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes from being told your experience is precious while you are inside the worst hour of it. The voice inside your head is already telling you you're failing. The chorus outside saying "it goes so fast" is the same voice, just from the other side of the room.
It doesn't help.
It makes you feel broken for not loving the unliftable thing. It makes you stop telling people the truth. It makes you, eventually, perform the version of new-parenthood that everyone wants to hear about, so they'll stop checking on you, so you can stop having to lie.
And then you go back to the kitchen at 3:14 a.m., alone with the part you weren't allowed to say.
「What we wished someone had said」
You're going to hate some of this. That doesn't mean you hate the baby.
You're going to want to leave the room and not come back. Don't act on it. But you can want it.
At 3 a.m., your job is to keep the baby alive. The loving part can come back later. It usually does.
You can be a good parent and resent today.
You can love your baby and miss your life.
Both of these can be true at the same time. Both of these are true for almost everyone. Nobody told us either.
The first time a friend actually said something like this to us, it was a woman named Laura, three months ahead of us in the new-parent timeline. She came over on a Tuesday evening with a Costco rotisserie chicken in a foil bag. She looked around at our apartment, looked at us, and said:
Some of this is going to be horrible. You didn't break anything by feeling that.
Then she put the chicken on the counter, ate two pieces of it standing up, and went home. That was the entire visit. Eleven minutes.
It was the most useful eleven minutes of week six.
「Three friends, three versions」
Once we started telling people the version of the story that wasn't shareable on Instagram, every parent we knew told us back. Not all at once. Quietly, one at a time, over coffee, on a long walk, in a text at 11 p.m. that always started the same way: "Actually..."
Dan, our friend with the two-year-old. Postpartum month two for him and his wife, he stood in the shower fully clothed because he didn't want to be the kind of person who couldn't handle a baby crying for forty-five minutes. He told us this years later. He said the shower scene is the thing he is most ashamed of, and also the thing he wishes someone had told him would happen. Nobody told him. He thought he was the only one.
Our neighbor across the hall. Six weeks postpartum, she didn't bond. She read every "love at first sight" pamphlet and felt nothing. The thing that broke her open wasn't time. It was one sentence from her midwife: "Some women don't fall in love with their baby until somewhere between week eight and week twenty. You're on the longer half. It's a real timeline. You're not broken." Forty-eight hours later, walking the baby past the Sunday-morning bagel place, she felt the thing happen for the first time. She told us later that the relief was louder than the love.
A reader named Joelle. (We changed her name.) She emailed us at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, three months in. She wrote: "I had this baby because I wanted this baby. I do not regret having him. I also have not slept in nine days. Both of these are true." We wrote back the same sentence we'd want to read: "Both of these can be true." That was the entire reply. She wrote back three weeks later. She said those were the most useful three words anyone had sent her.
「The line, again」
The "love every minute" thing started somewhere good. People wanted new parents to feel valued. They wanted to gesture at the fact that babies grow, that years move, that the rocking-chair version of you in eight years will miss this.
Fine.
But it is not, actually, true.
You will not love every minute. Loving the baby is one thing. Loving every minute of being inside the baby's first year is a separate thing, and almost nobody does, and the people telling you to do it are usually grandparents operating on selective memory. Selective memory is a survival mechanism. Forgive them for it. Just don't take the advice.
「The 3 a.m. protocol」
When you are inside the worst hour, here is what we actually did:
- Name the hour. Out loud, to the other adult. "This is one of the bad ones." The naming changes the room. It tells the other person you aren't fine and you don't need to be fine for the next forty-five minutes.
- Pass the baby. Twenty minutes. Don't make it a negotiation. The one holding the baby leaves the room. The one not holding the baby takes over. No discussion. No "are you sure." Twenty minutes on the timer.
- Eat something. Drink water. The hour gets meaningfully worse if your blood sugar is what it currently is. We kept a sleeve of saltines on the counter at all times for nine weeks.
- Text a parent friend who's two years ahead of you. Not asking for advice. Just: "rough one tonight." They'll know what it means. They will text back something useful or nothing, and either one is a kindness.
- Do not, under any circumstance, open Instagram. Mute the maternity accounts for the entire first year if you have to. They are not designed for the version of you sitting on the kitchen floor at 3:14 a.m.
That's it. That's the whole protocol. It will not fix the hour. It will get you through it.
「The thing we want to say」
In a year you will look back and the worst hour will be a story. In two years you'll have forgotten which hour. In ten you'll have constructed the montage that the rocking-chair version of you will tell other new parents.
But tonight, at 3:14 a.m., the version of you sitting on the kitchen floor doesn't need the montage. She needs someone who's already been there to say the part she's already thinking and is afraid to say out loud.
So we're saying it.
You didn't break anything by feeling it. The minutes you don't love are not a referendum on the years you will. Some of this is going to be horrible. Most of it is going to be ordinary. A small amount of it is going to be the kind of love that doesn't fit in a sentence.
You don't have to love every minute. You just have to keep going.
— Sam & Mia
If this sounds like more than a hard week
Some versions of "I'm not loving this" are the normal-but-unsayable thing we wrote about above. Other versions are postpartum depression or anxiety, in either parent, and the treatment is good and the help is real. If the bad hours are most hours, if you don't remember the last time something felt good, if the thoughts are getting darker than just tired, please talk to your OB or call Postpartum Support International at 1-800-944-4773 (or text "Help" to 800-944-4773). It's free and it's a real person. We have a longer piece on postpartum depression in dads that lists the signs that don't always look like sadness.