Pride and disappointment

Learning to slow down on the judgment slide

Nine weeks ago I gave birth to my first baby. Since then, there has been a lot of newness in my day-to-day as I add the identity of parent, mother, to my life experience. There is also a lot that has stayed the same in how I process the world.

This Substack will not become a parenting blog, but as I have always written about ideas and challenges me, my coaching clients, and my community are working through, there is probably going to be an increase in baby and parenting related content when it inspires me to contemplate and work through universal topics. So far, I am finding my time as a mother to be both unique to the parenting world as I learn things I couldn’t have understood before having a baby. But, I am also finding that what I am experiencing is also largely applicable to challenges I face in my head and life outside of parenting.

Although I wouldn’t say I’m open to constructive feedback on this Substack (i.e. I’ll write about what I want to write about), I am always curious about the topics that interest readers, so please do let me know if you want more of a certain topic!

If the words “boob” or “fart” make you uncomfortable, I’d skip this post.

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My baby is almost 8 weeks old and has recently decided he’d rather drink from a bottle than my boob in the light of day. This morning, he didn’t jerk his head away from me, scratch, or flail in resistance. I chimed with pride in his ability to return to daytime breast feeding after his hiatus. I warmed with pride in myself for my role in his acceptance. During a few minutes pause, he burped, soliciting another uncontainable cheer from my mouth. Then, he farted, so demurely, yet another effort to celebrate. He cooed and smirked, and my pride in my sweet baby poured out of me with kisses and shared giggles and declarations of my love for him.

Becoming a parent has made way for ongoing celebrations and pride in tiny movements, sounds, and expressions. I have written about pride before, and the practice that I nurtured for a solid six months last year. At that time, I looked and worked for reasons to feel and acknowledge daily accomplishments.

Now, I’m flooded with pride each day. I’m proud of my baby, like most parents are in these early months where every breath he takes feels like a treasure, a miracle, a wonder. I’m also proud of myself, almost smug with self congratulations at new accomplishments - milk production in those early weeks, tampering my anxieties about his safety, returning to exercise, my ability to push in labor (even if it didn’t lead to my desired delivery method), the healing of my c-section scar.

But on the other side of my pride can lay my disappointment and my judgment, mostly directed inward. When I walk to my kitchen holding two bottles full from pumping after breastfeeding, I saunter toward the freezer like a greedy squirrel storing its bounty for winter. But, then, when I sit in front of my hospital grade pump and look down at the scant traces of white liquid after all mine and this machine’s effort, my heart drops. I worry to John, I google what could be “wrong” with me. I feel my failure acutely when it hits and, as with the frequency of “wins” in early parenthood, there has also been an increase in the number of “losses.”

This vacillation between pride and disappointment is not unique to my parenting experience. Before parenthood, my performance in running was one arena for these emotions. Pride when I accomplished my racing goals or had a good workout. Frustration and disappointment when I didn’t hit my marks (which was most of the time).

At work, I might avoid reading feedback I received on a workshop I facilitated, steeling myself for the feelings of being personally attacked and not good enough if I received reviews lower than 100%, lower than perfection. But then, when I worked up the courage to look, I’d swell with joy over the praise I’d received.

Can I stay open to pride without subjecting myself to disappointment?

I pondered this in whispers with John in the wee hours of the morning, contemplating over our child’s innocently sleeping body that, although lives in this world, is not yet terrorized by his own thoughts of self-criticism.

John helped me see the times in which I don’t berate myself when I don’t experience the outcome I hope for. When my baby is fed, burped, and in a clean diaper, yet still wails in my face, I shrug and say “witching hour,” and keep soothing away, not taking his shrieks personally. When I don’t get moved forward in a round of interviews when job hunting, I brush the rejection aside, knowing that the market is competitive and I can only do my best.

So, how might I live more in the positive or neutral, and quickly recover from the negative when I do dip below that line into judgment?

As with much (all?) mental strengthening work, I think the strategy is to slow myself down. I picture a chutes and ladders board in my head when I’m on autopilot in this whole pride/disappointment game. My pride often plays out like a ladder. I’m slower to climb up to its heights, pointing to outside influences more quickly to explain my success. My disappointment looks like riding the long slide down, no place for me to get a foothold that might let me pause at neutrality or non- judgment before I land at the bottom.

I am practicing taking my disappointments as ladders instead of slides. At the moment, feeding my baby is one area I’m challenged most with these feelings of disappointment. As I take this ladder approach, I try to:

1. Pause when I start to feel sad, disappointed, anxious, angry. I know that something is up when I’m grumbling and short with John or when I tear up, internally begging my baby or my boobs to do what I want. It’s the signal to me to slow it down.

2. Remind myself of how fast things have and can change with my body surrounding having a newborn. What happened yesterday doesn’t have to happen today. Me, my body, and my baby are in constant coordination with each other, shifting as needs shift.

3. Worst-case-scenario the situation. For the milk supply challenge, the worst case scenario is that my baby starts to drink formula. This has always been a perfectly great option to me, so why am I getting caught up in the “breast is best” side of feeding one’s baby when it’s not even a camp I believe in (or that the data supports)? This is the worst case scenario and that’s not even a bad scenario when I stop and remember what my priorities are.

4. Proceed with controlling the things I can control and staying patient until I need to accept the worst case.

5. Repeat over and over and over until I get faster at stopping my slide and take those steps of the ladder up to neutrality and maybe even pride.

Did I still stay up for 30 minutes at 5am googling milk supply changes after being up with my baby for 2 hours? Of course! I’m human! I’m new to this!

But I’m not judging myself for that time googling. I’m letting that one roll off. I’m staying in the neutral. So I’ll call that a win, something to be a little proud of.