Just you wait

And other things people say to you during your first year of motherhood.

There’s a set of phrases people love to say to new parents, we’ve all heard them. They’re usually along the lines of this fun combo-meal: “just you wait,” “enjoy every moment,” “it goes so fast.” Parenthood comes with a script that aspires to be wisdom, but is received like a casserole dish you didn’t ask for. Hearts are in the right place, it just brings this face out of me.

The face of receiving unsolicited parenting wisdom, a la Claire Dunphy.

In your first years of being a mom, much of it feels like Groundhog’s Day. As someone who spends most of her days alone, having one-sided conversations with the baby and the dog, I do enjoy talking to adults outside of the house when I can. Although, motherhood makes you a public figure in the nicest and weirdest way, especially in a city like New York. People love to chat and it almost always goes like this:

How old is she? She’s gorgeous! Are those mama’s eyes I see!? Is she sleeping through the night yet? So alert already! Just you wait, you’re about to have your hands wayyyy more full. She’s about to walk? Prepare for carnage! But it really goes so fast, you know? So enjoy every minute because you’ll miss it!

These conversations are like a parenting Mad Libs. There’s actually nothing wrong with this dialogue, these are just the common niceties of well-meaning strangers. They see a baby and they get transported back to their early days of parenthood and feel the need to share. I know anyone who makes this sort of small talk doesn’t mean to make my eyes roll and doesn’t mean to give me that ick I feel from the unintentional cautionary tales. Not all of it turns me off and forces my phony smile, just 90% of it. The other 10% feels like someone left the porch light on for me and poured glass of wine to retire to.

Me, listening to parenting advice from strangers.

I usually go into my catalog of polite facial expressions and choose my fighter: a forced soft smile, a nod, or a hideous courtesy laugh. I’ve yet to meet a parent who loves the unsolicited advice. Oh, you’ve done this before? Please tell me everything!

If the small talk comes from a mom who looks like she’s on the other side of the early years and thriving beautifully, I try to genuinely listen to what she says. I take mental notes and look at her shiny hair, glowy skin and seemingly regulated nervous system like, “this could be you! In just a few more years.” If the chatter comes from someone older than my parents, I respect the wisdom and the willingness to share it, but respectfully, a lot has changed since that generation raised babies. Your generation could still dab whiskey on sore gums. Today, that’s considered child abuse.

I believe it takes a year to feel confident in a new job and while I still don’t know our entire trajectory, I feel pretty good about where we are. I absolutely haven’t mastered motherhood, but I’ve found my way in the same way that I don’t know which way is north or south but I can tell you where that one place is based on proximity to the drugstore.

Below is a sampling of the phrases I’ve heard on a daily basis since becoming a mother. Let’s get into it, shall we.

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The phrases of the first year of parenthood:

Just you wait: This has to be the worst thing new parents hear. I was also “just you waited” to death before I decided I’d flip it. It’s already terrifying enough to become a new parent and have your whole world change, then you have assholes warning you about all of the crappy parts, as if you don’t already know it’s going to be hard. If you became a parent without considering the hard parts, I sincerely offer my condolences. When you become a parent, you already know you’ll be significantly less energized, slightly malnourished, maybe a bit smelly and much poorer. But no one can possibly tell you about how your heart will nearly explode every day, because those feelings are hard to put into anecdotes that an expecting-parent or new parent can fully understand. So I decided to flip the meaning of just you wait. When I meet a new mom looking at my almost one-year-old, I say, “Just you wait, it’s just the best!” The good parts sneak up on you without warning. So when I say, just you wait, I mean, “Just you wait, you’ll be a puddle of emotions over how beautiful and wonderful parenthood is. Just you wait, you’ll get to watch an infant become a person more and more each day. Just you wait, you might hardly remember life before parenthood, without your new bestie, and you won’t want to.”

It gets better: Not easier, but better. Or to quote Jemima Kirke in her recent Elle interview, it gets easiarder. I’m hardly a year into motherhood so I can’t speak from loads of experience on this one just yet. Sometimes, this feels like a warning and sometimes, it feels like a promise of relief. Children grow and what was once hard becomes easier and then there’s a new set of hard things to adjust to. But isn’t everything easiarder, with or without children? And wouldn’t life get a bit boring if it was easy all the time.

Jemima Kirke for Elle.

It goes quickly / The days are long but the years are short: I loathed hearing this line because it’s so cliché, but I’m afraid this one has bit me in the tit and turned me into the annoying mom who tells strangers “it goes fast.” This year was a blink. Just this morning, I teared up walking into our apartment building thinking about how I burst into tears the day we came back home from the hospital, as parents. I feel like I just brought my baby home and every time I rock her to sleep feels like our first days when she would exclusively nap in my arms. Now, she’s standing confidently, preparing her little feet to walk and I’ll blink again and she’ll be stealing sweaters from my closet. It goes too quickly and what a privilege it is to watch someone grow and become a person. The only other person I’ll ever grow so much alongside is myself and it’s hard to notice her growing sometimes. So I made a miniature version of myself just so I could tell us both how proud I am of our growth. Motherhood has been the mirror I needed for years.

In the trenches: This one gives me such an ick. To be “in the trenches” means to be actively involved in the most difficult, grueling, or hands-on parts of combat, originating from WWI. Something about it just sounds so violent and reactive to me, like I’m just at home with my diaper cream, bracing for enemy fire. My parenthood is not a war zone, far from it. Is it the most difficult thing I’ve ever done? Absolutely. But it’s also the most beautiful chapter I’ve ever lived. (Also, I tried to find a photo of what it means to be in the trenches on Pinterest and all I got was a bunch of cute adverts for trench coats.)

In the trenches with my three future children. Thanks, Burberry.

Survival mode: I understand this means doing whatever it takes to survive the day but to me, this is more like what happens when there’s no other adult in the room. Being home alone with my baby all day, I’m the adult in the room and I show up for her but I can’t always show up for myself the same way. That means eating freezer-waffles off of a paper towel, throwing on Disney songs to keep us both entertained and leaving the apartment a mess because who’s going to stop me?? We’re not in any sort of danger, everyone is alive and unharmed. And I hate to go there but if Dad did these things, we’d just call him the fun parent. So perhaps we can call survival mode something else. Maybe it’s just “do what works” mode. (I wouldn’t dare call it Dad mode and offend the amazing fathers reading this but, it’s not far off.)

It’s just a season: I made this expression my whole personality as a coping mechanism for the challenging parts of parenthood. I wrote a whole Substack essay about longing for the next season and how parenthood is about being in one stage and constantly looking ahead to the next. I don’t think I’ll ever not do that, unfortunately. My husband and I will see a little girl toddling around, speaking in complete sentences and we say to each other, “I can’t wait until that stage.” But also, I can wait. Because I know what I know now and we shouldn’t rush the seasons because once they’re gone, they really are gone — the wonderful parts and the hard parts are a packaged deal. So when I’m drained and a bit hopeless about how much longer I can operate on reserve energy, I say to myself, it’s just a season. And I immediately feel sad that my baby won’t be the same baby in the next season so I better savor the dream I’m currently living in.

Enjoy every moment: Which brings us to this one. This is a touchy one because I don’t care how much you love motherhood, you just can’t enjoy every moment. But even after just one year of motherhood, I’ve learned you get amnesia for the parts of it you don’t enjoy. Your brain completely blocks out the annoying stuff and all grievances and that’s exactly how we trick ourselves into having more babies! Hooray! Selective memory is probably a big part of why humanity still exists. But then there’s the really horrible parts, like seeing our children in pain or stress and those parts we don’t block out, we hold onto them and they make us better parents because we retain knowledge for how to problem solve faster when we can’t prevent or ignore the hard.

Give yourself grace: Mothers love to say this to each other but aren’t able to give themselves the same grace. What we’re really saying: give yourself a break, forgive yourself, don’t be so hard on yourself, cut yourself some slack. I, too, suck at this. Us mothers are caring for living beings, that’s a full-time gig. Anything else is just extra. So when I feel like I achieved nothing in a day, I remind myself I actually fed, protected and loved the heck out of a little being, and attempted to do the same for myself and that’s actually a lot.

Every baby is different: I feel like this is something polite people say when they really want to tell you their way and what worked for them. But then they hear your way and don’t totally agree with your way so they follow it up with this…

Oh, you’ll figure it out: Which is a delicate dance around, “do it your way!” Sometimes, it is a genuine vote of confidence. Sometimes “you’ll figure it out” feels less like encouragement and more like someone slowly backing out of the room. I’ve been the unsolicited advice police lately and I even police my own language when I talk to other mothers. I ask, “Would it be helpful to hear what worked for us?” Or I preface it by saying “this is just the way that I know and I hardly know anything!” I’m still brand new to this whole mothering thing and have no business lecturing anyone on how the heck to do the thing we’re figuring out as we go.

Careful, you’re gonna spoil that baby! I was immediately offended the first time I heard this one. I wanted to fight the person telling me to hold my baby less. YOU CAN’T SPOIL YOUR BABY. What, I’m going to love my baby too much? Carry her everywhere? Hold her all day when she wants to be held? Feed her on demand while she sleeps beside me in my bed? Give her dedicated attention all day? I believe this is exactly what I signed up for, I thought it was just part of the job description. If the job is what you make of it, this is how I’ve chosen to structure my role and it compensates me handsomely in giggles and unconditional love.

You’re doing great: The first time a stranger said this to me, it shattered me. I was juggling the dog and the stroller, trying to get a coffee. It was raining and I was holding an umbrella over the bassinet like my baby was made of sugar. A mom ahead of me in the coffee line put a lid on my cappuccino and said, in the most genuine tone, “you’re doing great.” I welled up with this “I am?!?!” doe-eyed look. I waited until I walked away with my coffee to cry. This was like one of those moments when you’re absolutely not okay but someone asks you if you’re okay and the empathy mows you down. The “you’re doing great”can come across as a tad condescending if someone doesn’t want to hear it. You’ve gotta really look someone in the eyes when you say it. When I see a new mom with a fresh baby trying to navigate the morning walk with the stroller that hardly fits through the door, I like to race to hold the door open for her, I look her in the eye and as genuinely as I can say it, I give her a little “you’re doing great.”

Me, cheering you on!

You’ll miss this: This is the one that feels like a promise and a threat. I already do. I miss it all. I miss the daily contact naps, I miss the milk drunk faces, I miss that week when we just heard raspberry-fart sounds on repeat and thought it was the funniest thing. Even that thing she did yesterday that brought me so much joy, I miss that already too and I wonder if she’ll do it again. My most tragic parts of parenthood are the lasts I don’t know are lasts until they never happen again. And then they’re quickly greeted with a new first to make up for it.

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The unsolicited advice I would give a new parent:

• Ignore the “just you waits” because raising children is hard, yes, but every milestone becomes more fun and more special.

• Watch as much TV in the beginning as you can. Even loud TV. Hell, have a Michael Bay marathon. The startle reflex is adorable and they only sleep through explosions for so long.

• Take pictures but also take lots of videos. They become little people so quickly you hardly notice it without a documented point of reference.

• Be nice to each other, no matter how sleepy you are. Your person is your primary lifeline, maybe they’re your only lifeline. Fill each other’s cup, literally (hydration is important) and figuratively, and don’t keep score with who does what.

• Spoil the heck outta that baby. Spoil them more than you ever thought you could because I’m told there will come a day when they no longer let you.

• Be around for as much of it as you can. Come home in time for bath time and bedtime. Be there for the first foods and first everythings you can choose. Nothing we do will ever be as important as raising good people.