You are not alone, an extract from Baby Change

Nothing had prepared us for this moment – not the antenatal classes nor my shop observations, nothing. I had never lived with a baby or been near a relative bringing up a baby.

We had a tiny human being with us and our world was changed for ever.
Even the five-seater car felt small.

As we drove home at literally 15 mph, with the car behind beeping like crazy, I said to Gavin: ‘I cannot believe they are trusting us to keep this human being alive!’

Those early days are a bit of a blur . . . I think they are for any parent. Beautiful but painful. Intimate yet exhausting. Emotional and frustrating. Somehow we do it, because we were made to.

Breastfeeding was impossible for me. I had five different rashes all over my body, a ton of medication and no milk. It was one of those things that I thought I would take to like a duck to water but in fact I couldn’t. I knew my mum wanted me to breastfeed and the health visitor wanted me to continue, so I tried to carry on, but Amelie got more fractious and I got more tired and so the milk dried up even more.

Sometimes we do need to listen to our gut and stop people-pleasing. I cried lots of tears, holding my daughter as she gulped down three ounces of bottled milk, but then we both fell fast asleep for a few hours and woke with a brighter perspective!

We may have a birth plan or a post-baby plan, but we need to be flexible (the way of Jesus is not legalistic or rigid); my ideal did not work out with either and I wish I had been more relaxed in those early days.

After nearly two weeks of navigating feeding and snatching hours of sleep, bonding with my girl through talking to her face to face and bathing her each day, I began to realize that I was pretty terrified of Gavin going back to work. We had been handling this addition together and all of a sudden I was going to be alone with a baby! I was feeling very anxious and trying to work out how I would ‘do’ the day when he left the house.

I had never felt as though I needed to depend on a person to this extent before. It made me aware of a sudden loss in confidence. I also realized that he was going back into a world where I could not tread right now and I felt annoyed and jeal- ous of him. The range of emotions was wide and switched and changed with every passing moment.

It was also the year that Madeleine McCann disappeared. Do you remember her? She was the 3-year-old girl who was taken from her bed in a ground-floor apartment where she was staying on holiday in Portugal. It happened in May 2007. Amelie was born in November 2006.
If this had happened before Amelie was born, I would have prayed for the family and felt concern for them, but that would have been it. However, this incident occurred during a time when we were brand new parents and the sleep deprivation was at its worst.

I recall feeling so paranoid about putting Amelie to bed – especially when we went on holiday to France and the bedrooms were in the basement, with sliding doors. I would check on her so regularly and struggled to be away long enough to eat dinner upstairs in the apartment!
Becoming parents was not just a change to our day-to-day practical lives: it brought with it a huge shift in us as people. Our faith was affected. Our emotions became more sensitized. Our minds had thoughts they had never had before and our bodies were weaker than we had ever known.

Parenting may sound hard core. It is. But it is also the most life-changing, moulding, growing experience we have had so far. Do I wish I could go back and not get pregnant? Absolutely not, but do I long that we had had more tools to navigate pregnancy? Yes, and that’s why I have taken pen to paper. Parenting is the most transforming journey we have ever embarked upon, and one that has hopefully made and is making us more like Jesus.

This book helps you make wise decisions over your children. It addresses the challenges of parenthood – for instance, should you return to work? Anne uses examples from her own struggle, together with biblical insights and other people’s experiences, to help you know you are not alone.

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