Nobody is coming to tell me I’m doing this right

Dear Momma,

You make four hundred decisions before lunch with a new baby, and you’re not sure of a single one. Hunger cry or tired cry? Is the nap too short, or is the nap fine and the internet wrong? Is this the rash you watch, or the rash you call about? Each question is small. Together they sit on your chest all day. And because nobody ever tells you that you got it right, you never get to set them down.

Every other job you’ve had came with some kind of feedback: a grade, a review, a paycheck, a thank-you. This one offers almost none. The baby can’t tell you the feed went well. The pediatrician sees you for fifteen minutes every few weeks. So you go looking for the grade everywhere else. You look in the app, the forums and the other mothers at the clinic, and in the pause before your own mother answers. Every one of them has a different standard, and at any given moment you’re failing at least one.

Here’s what I think is really going on. You aren’t bad at this. You were handed the job without the authority that goes with it. Every opinion about your baby arrives sounding like a rule, so without meaning to, you started checking each move against the last thing you read. You became the assistant in your own nursery.

That was never the job. There is no doing everything correctly. Your baby needs a mother who is steady enough to decide, and settled enough to change her mind without falling apart about it. That’s what leading looks like this early. It isn’t strictness. A newborn has nothing to be strict about. It’s something quieter: you read your baby as well as you can, you choose, you hold the choice long enough to learn from it, and you adjust.

Sort the decisions

Most of what you agonize over falls into two piles.

The small pile really is about safety: how your baby sleeps, how they ride in the car, when a fever means a call, and what they should and shouldn’t eat, and when. Those have real answers. Get them from your pediatrician and follow them without apology.

Everything else, which is most things, has several good answers. Breast, bottle or both. Rocking or not rocking. Contact naps or crib naps this week. A loose rhythm or a tighter one. The best answer is the one that works for your baby, your body and your home.

The exhaustion comes from treating the second pile like the first. When every decision feels like a safety decision, every decision carries that weight. So hold the safety questions firmly and settle them with a professional. Then decide the rest like the capable adult you are, without a committee.

Use it tonight: the decision you’re allowed to stop making

Pick the one thing you’ve been re-deciding every single day, the one that eats the most of your thinking. Maybe it’s whether to wake them from a long nap. Maybe it’s whether to give the bottle of formula, or whether you’re “allowed” to put them down in a safe place and take a shower.

Make the call once, in daylight, with a clear head. Write it down if that helps. Then don’t reopen it for a week unless something actually changes: a fever, a real problem, or new information from someone who knows your baby.

Watch what happens to the noise. Often, the baby does fine, and you get back a surprising amount of yourself. A lot of the exhaustion was never the baby. It was the trial you’ve been holding in your own head every hour, with yourself as the defendant.

A reasonable decision you can adjust is worth more to your baby than a perfect one you’re still researching at 2 a.m.

Nobody is coming with the grade, Momma. You get to decide what “right” looks like in your home, and you know more about this particular baby than anyone else alive.

— Momma

This letter draws on the opening chapter of Dear Momma Baby, the complete book for the first eighteen months: how to lead a very small person with confidence, and hear your own voice over everyone else’s advice.