Newborn fog

Right, the newborn fog. It’s been on my mind ever since I came out of it after Lara’s birth (about 9 months later!!!). I didn’t have a name for that state of being, until I read the term “newborn fog” in another mom’s blog. It totally covers everything. Looking back I noticed that, though I did enjoy my little baby girl in those first 9 months, I hadn’t felt great myself. Everything had been focussed on my baby and I’d forgotten about myself. I had a hard time to get my own thoughts and feelings in line, so they kind of cluttered up in my head. Taking care of Lara took most of my “free time” and her coming into our lives just changed everything. After about 9 months I kind of woke up and had a huge craving for taking up a new hobby and for expressing myself. That’s when I started blogging.
But ever since then I’ve been thinking about how to prevent this when a new baby would come. I guess a bit of a fog is good to get attached to my baby, but I feel the newborn fog I experienced with Lara is a bit too much.
After musing over it in the past weeks I feel that some solutions are sinking in. I know that I’ll have to be a bit more relaxed on the new baby’s schedule (sleeping and eating) and a bit more strict on my own schedule (to prevent myself from crashing on the couch whenever I get the chance; that doesn’t give me the satisfaction I need by the end of the day and will only make me feel more tired). Fortunately Lara will also force me to stay active.
I think I’ll also be able to be more confident in certain things. With Lara we’ve experienced that our way of feeding, bathing, getting her to sleep and so on work well, so we don’t have to figure that out again.
And another big thing is that in Lara’s first year we’ve done about 8 trips to my family-in-law in Germany. My husband Marc had lost contact with them for more than 10 years, so since the contact had just been renewed we invested a lot of time in it. But now we notice that it’s good to take a step back and slow down on the contact a bit (several reasons). For me those trips have certainly been too much. I am very glad we don’t have to do that anymore. It has been quite an influence on my newborn fog, draining energy and happiness from me (especially since I am a so called “pleaser”).

Anyway, I’ll keep musing about this newborn fog. So maybe I’ll be back on this later.