Motherhood Unplugged: My Story of Overcoming Overwhelm and Disconnect With a Colicky Baby

A few weeks ago, we celebrated my daughter’s second birthday with a Minnie Mouse beach party. We were on a local beach vacation for the week in the midst of a 24 month sleep regression, and Camryn had been waking up every night, barely napping, throwing tantrums left and right, and acting extremely clingy and extra demanding.

She spent half of her party freaking out and melting down, and as I rocked her to sleep that night, I shed a few tears of disappointment over yet another otherwise nice day being upended by the stress of parenthood to Cammie.

Every tooth and every possible regression have equated to these kinds of draining days, weeks and months. The truth is, I don’t have a laidback toddler, and I never had a laidback baby either. There’s been little that’s easy about parenthood to Camryn. I love her so much, but whew, it’s often exhausting!

This regression (which seems to be finally ending, *fingers crossed*) has got me thinking a lot about her colicky newborn days. Truth be told, I did not feel strongly connected to my baby right off the bat. For me, complete love and admiration for my child wasn’t something that hit me like a ton of bricks on the day she was born like I’d heard it would. Forging that unbreakable bond was more of an unfolding, bit by bit.

Not falling head over heels for your newborn on day one is a taboo topic that doesn’t get talked about a lot. It’s important to talk about and I know that I’m not alone, though I often felt like it. Over the past two years, I’ve jotted down my experience (often after a 3 AM wake up) and today I wanted to share it with you. Here’s my story of surviving the Velcro baby days & falling in love with my (still wildly high maintenance) little girl.

My Story of Overcoming Overwhelm and Disconnect With a Colicky Baby

“Whoa! Listen to those pipes,” the nurse said with a chuckle. Here I was in the maternity ward merely hours after giving birth, just as I was reaching my 36th week of pregnancy. With an early birth, one of the concerns is underdeveloped lungs, but this was not a worry of ours. From the moment she was born, Camryn had a cry with the urgency and screech of a fire alarm.

When you’re pregnant, everyone is happy to share their stories and to provide insight about what to expect. Women light up when giving advice about what the newborn days are like, and laugh when they talk about the whirlwind of changes that take place during pregnancy. Out of everything I’d heard and read, nothing could have quite prepared me for the shock I felt at holding a 5 lb 9 oz baby – my baby.

From everything I’d heard, I had anticipated that I’d feel this crazy bond with my baby from the first moment I held her. But truth be told, I didn’t feel the indescribable connection I’d so often heard about. More accurately, I felt like I was holding someone else’s baby. I was floating outside of my body, looking at this little human.

While I instinctively felt the need to protect and take care of her, when she cried – which was more constant and unnerving than I could ever have imagined – it felt like someone else’s baby crying. I thought I’d feel overwhelming love, but instead I just felt like my life as I knew it had been hijacked overnight by a very small, albeit very powerful force.

Expectations vs Reality

So often in life, situations can feel monumentally challenging when the reality differs from the expectations we’ve had in our heads. While I had no disillusions about the first few months of motherhood being tiring, at the same time, I envisioned having a bundle of joy that seemed content with life a good portion of, or at least some of the time.

A little girl I could dress up in a ridiculously cute newborn outfit and lay down in a basket for Anne Geddes-like photos as she peacefully slept.

But Camryn was what my mother calls “a tough cookie” right from the start. She was colicky, fussy, and the only thing that seemed to provide her with a bit of tranquility was being in my arms. Even as I held her all day long (quite literally all.day.long), it often felt like there was nothing I could do that would make her happy.

The first several months, I could hardly ever put her down without her immediately screaming until her face turned crimson colored.

I learned to do things one-handed. I became a master smoothie maker while holding my bundle of “joy.” There were many days when I peed and brushed my teeth holding my baby. My choice was to either hold her, or listen to her blood curdling scream while she lay on her baby pillow or some nearby swinging, vibrating, or moving apparatus that turned out to not be a convincing replacement for me in the least bit.

There were no newborn baby-in-a-bucket photos because every time I changed her outfit, Camryn would get so upset at the inconvenience.

And Then There Was The Milk Dilemma

I was forced to exclusively pump my milk because she was too impatient to directly breastfeed – screaming uncontrollably when I tried to feed her. For a process that’s seemingly so natural, breastfeeding Camryn seemed to be a puzzle I (and lactation consultants) could not solve. The feelings of breastfeeding failure were hard to swallow.

Pumping milk and then feeding it to your baby in a bottle is essentially double the work, double the time, and as I experienced it, a frustrating process that feels like a part-time job all on its own. Most of my milk pumping sessions ended with me sweating from stress and ripping the suction cups off my nipples as fast as possible so that I could soothe my colicky baby who was not happy being only next to me, not on top of me.

The Exhaustion of 24/7 Clinginess

Cammie refused to sleep on anyone or anything but me. I tried countless times to ease her into our new expensive bassinet (which barely got used) trying every trick in the book, but it was as if there was an alarm that went off in her brain as soon as she sensed that I was not holding her, and she’d be wide awake once again. And once she was awoken, she did not go back to sleep easily.

I had pictured life with a newborn to be challenging and life-changing – but I didn’t expect it to be such an all-consuming, overwhelming experience that left me in tears on a daily basis. It felt nearly impossible for me to forge a strong connection with Camryn when she was seemingly miserable the vast majority of the time.

In my haze of newborn exhaustion, I began to question if this feeling was normal, or if I was missing the maternal gene that prior to motherhood, I had always believed I possessed.

When family members made seemingly innocent comments such as, “But isn’t she just your everything already?”, I resisted the urge to look at them like they had three heads and scream, “THIS IS ALL TOO MUCH AND I AM NOT OK!”

I had always been an advocate for having a positive mindset amidst challenges, but in my sleep deprived state, I sometimes found it hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Would it be like this forever? It felt like it. This was my new normal.

I was abundantly grateful that Camryn was completely healthy, but I couldn’t help but wonder numerous times a day why she was so high maintenance. Perhaps my put together attitude, laugh-when-you-want-to-cry personality, and Instagram account told a different story – after all, who wants to be judged as the mother who doesn’t feel a strong bond with their baby? – but inside I struggled.

There were so many times when I felt drained, trapped, and couldn’t push aside the sinking feeling that I was disconnected from my own life – pretending to be a good mom, when deep down I wasn’t sure I deserved the title.

I went from being a world traveling, self-care junkie to an exhausted woman who spent so much of her time in a rocking chair in her living room – soothing my Velcro baby, hooking my dry nipples onto a pumping machine every couple of hours, frozen in position while my little one napped only on top of me.

It had taken me a long time to get to a place where I was ready for motherhood to be front and center in my life. When I had my baby, my husband and I were about to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. I was big on prioritizing a life full of adventure, healthy habits & pursuing the things that made me feel most alive.

One of my biggest fears was that a baby would monopolize my life in a way that rendered me unable to continue to do things I was passionate about, that I would lose what made me, me. And in this overwhelming start to motherhood, it was hard to feel like things were going to get easier.

I’m no stranger to tests of mental fortitude: I’ve hiked 25 miles in a single day. I’ve been a Marine Corps wife who coped with my military husband being away for long stretches of time on deployments. And I had meditated and hypnobirthed my way through a non-medicated labor giving birth to my daughter.

But motherhood is a different test of mental and physical strength – in a category of its own. There was no finish line, no definitive point when things would get better. Perhaps not having an ‘end’ date on when life would feel easier is a large part of what made it feel so tough.

To give your all to motherhood and feel like your child isn’t content isn’t just frustrating. It hits you at your core. It rocked my soul and made me question many times whether I was meant to be a mother.

How I Survived Without Losing It

To make it through, I did the only thing I felt I could do: I took it one day, sometimes one hour or even minute, at a time. The most important part of self-care to me at this time was letting myself sit in whatever I was feeling and practicing self-compassion.

I made several adjustments in my life, and those shifts combined with me surviving the fourth trimester and beyond resulted in things slowly getting better, tiny bit by bit.

For one, I began to talk about my feelings of disconnect…

…with people who I knew could sympathize with me – not those who would just stare at me blankly and make me feel like a terrible mom. Simply verbalizing it made me feel a little better. I felt like I was confessing to something awful, something that’s often not spoken of, but every time I talked about how deflating the experience was for me, it made me feel like I could take a deep breath and start to move on to better days.

Secondly, I started supplementing my breastmilk with formula and weaned off of pumping.

While I had been powering through believing that breastmilk is best, my pumping and feeding situation was undoubtedly contributing to my feeling of overwhelm as a new mom. Taking that task off of my plate felt like a weight had been lifted.

Thirdly, I hired help.

Another thing that helped immensely was hiring a nanny to come over a few days a week so that I could actually work in my office for a couple hours straight. Often I would get a workout in at home or take a class at a fitness studio, and this hour of self-care time did wonders for giving me a feeling of normalcy back. Getting breaks made me feel more like myself and gave me space to come back and feel more patient with and appreciative of my baby.

As I became a bit less of a novice mother, I also started to learn a few tips and tricks to make stressful newborn situations slightly less traumatizing. Camryn had a habit of completely losing it in the car and had zero interest in looking at toys or other distractions as a newborn. However, I learned to time up rides so that I was putting us in the best situation possible for a smooth ride. She even started falling asleep in the car sometimes. It only worked (and continues to only work) some of the time, but at least she was no longer having a meltdown on every ten-minute car ride.

Our Gradual, Unbreakable Bond

As Camryn’s traumatizing, hours-long freak outs lessened and I started to see hints of things getting better each week, slowly but surely I started to feel more and more bonded with my baby. I would catch myself looking at her doing something cute and get swept up in a moment of mommy bliss.

A lot of things weren’t how I envisioned them to be in my first year of parenthood (or to be honest, my second year either), and it’s taught me a new kind of patience. When I look back at my journey to developing that unbreakable mother-daughter bond, somewhere along the line, I realized that it’d be best if I dropped my expectations and accept my daughter for who she is – even the parts of her that make my life more challenging.

For the first time in my life, I’ve found it difficult to resist getting caught up in the comparison trap that stares me in the face every time I hang out with mom friends, read parenthood forums and articles, or even just meet another toddler on the playgound, so this practice of acceptance is an ongoing work in progress.

Camryn came into this world like a hurricane, determined to make her early debut, and as it turns out, her birth was very on par with her personality. At 2 years old, she’s a fiery, sensitive, nonstop talking, running, and dancing little girl who cries hard but laughs hard too. Her sleep habits are still wildly unpredictable, as she never has allowed us to get on a constant routine, or just when I think I know what she’ll do, she switches it up.

Feeding my toddler still feels a lot like I’m a competitor on a Gordon Ramsey cooking show getting yelled at for more and scolded when I don’t work quick enough.

But, I think my daughter is the most wildly beautiful human I’ve ever known.

And now here I am – a million kisses, a thousand salty tears, and countless hours of sleeplessness later – knowing that this child, not the easygoing baby I had drummed up in my head, was meant for me. I know now that I was given her to challenge me and change me.

When she grabs my face and gives me a big open mouthed kiss, or lets out the cutest giggle when I do something that amuses her, or looks up at me with her eyes shimmering, I know in my soul that this child was meant to be mine, and I was meant to be hers.

Recently Camryn asked to hold my hand while she was laying in her crib, and I was laying next to her on the floor waiting for her to fall asleep (progress from the early days, though still not ideal). As I took her hand, she stared at me with her big blue eyes, and exclaimed, “My true love!” (an ode to Olaf in Frozen), and then, “Mama, I love you soooo much.”

After all we’ve been through, indeed, she is my true love too.

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More on motherhood and pregnancy: 

• 8 Tips for a Healthy, Happy Pregnancy 
• My Empowering Hypnobirthing Story
• 5 Pregnancy Surprises I Wasn’t Expecting