For many women, becoming a new mother is the most wondrous experience available in life. Holding a newborn in your arms, seeing its eyes blink and focus for the first time, feeling its soft skin, watching its first fluttering kicks outside of the womb.
These earliest feelings of wonder are the beginnings of one of the most important relationships there is. Get it right and the benefits of attachment made at this early stage will be felt by your child in its personal and social relationships throughout its entire life.
And yet, being a new mother is not always serene and plain-sailing. In fact, almost all new mothers, especially first timers, will experience myriad anxieties and have a plethora of questions tumbling around inside their heads at any given time. For example, the following list is just a sample of the kinds of questions that are likely to occupy your mind over the first few weeks:
Yes, motherhood brings more joy than you can ever imagine, but it also brings worry and anxiety. Newborns may not weigh much more than a large tub of ice cream but their gravitational pull is so enormous that you will spend the next sixteen years, or so, orbiting their growing planet rather than perhaps focusing on your own solar system. Your child will literally become your world.
But this doesn’t mean that you won’t sometimes feel upset, unwell or lonely; you will still have your own welfare to look out for. But then it should come as no surprise that life’s greatest event, childbirth, comes with a whole set of brand new issues.
This is why, as well as looking after baby, you will also have to take steps to look after yourself. Here at My BabyManual we want to help you achieve this and can provide information and resources in relation to your own health and wellbeing. For example, we can help with all of the following:
Here at My BabyManual we have a site packed full of resources for new mothers and their partners, so they can be supported and prepared before and throughout their journey into parenthood. Read on for help, advice and information from My BabyManual and its expert doctors, midwives, obstetricians, nutritionists and more.