How Baby

There’s a maxim that brought me a lot of comfort in early parenthood, especially when I was emotionally struggling with transitioning to formula feeding (you know, because I “””failed””” at the “””best””” way to feed Momo, sarcasm quotes entirely intended), that goes something like this:

As long as you’re feeding your baby, you’re doing it right.

And this goes for all of baby’s needs; it doesn’t matter how you warm them, or love them, or bathe them, or convince them to sleep, so long as it gets done and everyone’s still alive and sane at the end. I found this immensely comforting, between Googling ‘lactation cookies’ and ‘why baby hiccup’.

The important thing is raising a healthy and happy human. But there’s so many schools of thought on how, and so much emotional and cultural baggage wrapped up in defending your way, like it’s a zero-sum game. Everyone kind of loses their head when it comes to raising babies, and two schools of thought look more like a battle lines being drawn. Everyone wants to be right. No one wants to be a bad parent.

In the end, you don’t get a medal for making the best choices, or the most natural ones, or the hardest ones. There’s only the satisfaction of having raised a human, and how they enrich your life. How to get there is going to look different for everyone, because people — parents and children alike — are different. But so long as we all cross the finish line having done our best, isn’t that enough?

(PS: check back on Thursday for the first biweekly update! Yay!)