High Needs Baby

Dr. Sears invented this term and I feel like it fits my baby quite well. It's hard to mother this baby. She is so cute and I really do love her. She is also the saddest Baby I've ever known and the most demanding. I wish I had gotten a picture of her at 2 or 3 months when she was sad. It was the most heartbreaking look. So, naturally, I couldn't bring myself to take a picture instead of comforting her.

The first few months were so physically draining, but when I calmed down so did she. The next few months were like bliss. She slept for a stretch of 6  hours at night, I could put her in a bumbo seat near me and get my dishes done during the day, and she could stay in a wet diaper for more than 10 minutes!

Now, at 8 months I feel like the pendulum of exhaustion has swung clear over to the emotional side. This post is really just a reflection on my experience and figuring how to go from here.

Sometimes I feel really judged about my parenting approach. I feel like others think I made my baby this way, or that I'm too soft and my baby is ruling my life - like I'm a slave to my baby. The truth is, I totally have affected my baby and I've pretty much dedicated life to her right now. Perhaps my extreme anxiety for her welfare caused her to learn to be anxious about life. Perhaps my anxiety was a just response to her sensitive and demanding nature. (She cried so much when she was born that I had a hard time believing she was ok when she was calm.) My younger brother's theory is that her birth was so gentle, everything after that was traumatizing. Who knows? It may be something altogether different. What God let me know is that she and I are two different people and we have learn to understand and love each other.  She came to earth as a real person with her own personality and probably her own expectations. As the child, she has to learn to trust and obey me, and as the mother I have to teach her how to trust me and provide the nurture she needs.

So, teaching a 6 month old baby how to snuggle may not be every mother's requirement, and that's OK. Children aren't meant to be clones and families are meant to last forever. Motherhood doesn't come in one size fits all. To a child, Mother is the world, and there is no comparison.