A while ago, I was out for a house call at a new mom, who told me about how her relationship to her partner had changed, since they had their child. They had just been married few weeks before birth, and she told me, how anxious she had been about preparing for a baby in jus a few weeks, since all planning energy had gone into the wedding. But she reassured me, that having everything ready for the baby was a piece of cake, compared to the big project of having a wedding – just buy a crib and a pram, and you you’re all set!
As she was telling me about all this, I was thinking about, how little of the nesting process is material. Nesting is the concept of pregnant women getting a need to prepare for the baby to come, washing the clothes, setting the stuffed animals in order, having the nursery all decorated and ready. The process is seen as natural, and necessary, letting the mother-to-be visualize and imagine life with an infant. Indeed the very word – “nesting” – draws a parallel to bird’s natural instinct of creating a home for their eggs.
But make no mistake: for humans, and especially the modern kind, nesting is a mental process, and does not need a great physical manifestation – most of us have homes for our children, when we conceive. It might not be the perfect home, but luckily, few of us use our pregnancy urges to get a roof over our heads.
Preparing for a baby is a very big thing. You are revising your whole life, your identity, your priorities, making status over where you are and why. You are also worrying about who you will be as a mother, you are considering how others parent, and what you wish for, for your family. You worry about being insufficient, and you worry about if your child will be healthy, be happy. And you realize, really realize the responsibility of having a new life in your hands. No wonder tears come easily to you, no wonder you sleep as soon as you have the chance. You are not only creating a new soul inside you, you are creating a new soul within yourself too. You are creating a baby, AND a mother.
These mental preparations, may very well have physical manifestations. Making decisions about what kind of diapers you want to use, researching and buying them can give you a real sense of accomplishment and joy. Minimalistic nesting has nothing to do with taking this joy away, or neglecting the importance of this.
What minimalistic nesting is, though, is keeping focus on the important, emotional preparation, and not letting the arbitrary, material preparation get in your way of this. If the material preparation goes overboard, this is at best unnecessary, and may very well be damaging to your mental nesting.
At best, the material preparation – buying a breast pump (just in case) buying every type of baby alarm (because you don’t know which you prefer), worrying about what type of pacifier is the best, checking out when you have to sign up for schools and kindergartens – is unnecessary. Being knew in the job, you have no foundation to make wise decisions anyway, and 90% of your time and energy is wasted. The breast pump never got used, the baby alarms were on sale the month after, the baby never got used to using a pacifier. Using your energy on reading up on what EVERYBODY ELSE needed to buy, simply won’t give you the experience you need to be energy efficient and wise. So if you are lucky, most of that material preparation, will be a waste.
If you are less lucky, the process of externalizing the preparation will damage or compromise the internal process. Every time you shift focus from dreams, visions, thoughts and feelings about your baby, your motherhood and your family, and start focusing on prams, diagrams and kilograms, you are directing energy away from the important maturation of the soul. Somethings gotta go. You can’t focus your energy everywhere at the same time.
So my best advice is this:
Take a deep breath, close your eyes. Try to connect with your baby – not by disturbing it, but by simply sending it a thought. Put your hands gently on your belly, and breath a few deep breaths again. Imagine you baby inside you. Imagine its position, how it is taking the world in, try to remember if it has sent you any messages the last 24 hours, like kicks, strange cravings, intuitions or feelings. Take it all in in gratitude for the baby’s communication with you. Now imagine what your message would be to the baby. Just imagine, don’t do anything. Would you ask the baby for some peace and quiet? Would you say a prayer for the Baby? Would you want to send the baby a beautiful visual of the world outside, that it cannot yet see? When every you start feeling stressed about thing you must get done, things you must prepare, then substitute that stress with a 5-10-minute focus on the baby inside. Because the gut is telling you to prepare -but it is you head fooling you into believing it means buying stuff. The heart is where the preparation needs to be.
This kind of preparation will secure your baby’s wellbeing, better than any pacifier. Your job right now is opening up to the baby – not just of sentimental reasons – but because this direct connection between you and the baby is what will keep the baby alive, happy, well looked out for, and fully satisfied physically and mentally. It is difficult to open up your mind, when it is new. But you have 9 months to prepare, and many years after that to practice. Always keep the eyes on the ball. The ball being the baby, not the pram.
When you connect with your baby, and your mother-inside, the material preparation will be much easier. You will soon realize, that the pram can be bought later – when the child is big enough to take longer strolls. That the pacifier might not be used, and is a disturbing element in the nursery. That listening to what the baby needs, before possessing it, creates a larger mental room for the baby’s own growth and development.
Listening to your baby’s needs, right from the start will allow you to feel the truth, that baby’s call for mothers, not for teddy bears. The seek for breasts, not pacifiers. They sleep well in a sling on the chest, not alone in a crib. They play with whatever their minds encounter, not necessarily fisher-price’s newest baby gym.
The next part will be about, just how little merchandise you can get by with, when having a baby. And although it might seem quite anti-climactic, that you can buy everything you need 2ndhand in one afternoon for only one or two weekly allowances, I assure you, the mental space is cleared up, and creates room for the real stuff. The good stuff, that you never forget or regret.
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