New, in a familiar way

The second time, Claire wasn’t supposed to fall apart.

She’d already done the midnight feeds and the cracked nipples and the one-second-per-step’s up and down the hallway with a baby who refused to sleep unless she was slowly dislocating her own shoulder. She’d Googled enough things in the first year of Ava’s life to qualify for a fake medical degree. She knew which milestones were worth watching and which ones were just there to make you feel like you were falling behind. She knew how to take care of a baby.

This was supposed to be familiar. Still tiring, sure. But familiar and manageable.

Then Leo arrived.

And it turned out he hadn’t read the same manual.

Everything that soothed Ava made him furious. He arched away from her chest like she was made of hot metal. He screamed if she sat down, like a tiny dictator who believed knees were offensive. The carrier that had once lulled Ava into a warm, floppy coma now twisted Leo into something resembling an origami frog.

She kept reaching for the things that used to work, but they kept slipping through her fingers.

Sometimes she’d sit on the edge of the bed and try to remember what Ava was like at this age. Did Ava nap at nine? Was she contact napping at this point? Had she started rolling? She remembered two-hour naps, at least sometimes. She remembered watching TV while Ava slept on her chest. But those memories felt distant now, like old diary entries someone else had written.

There’s a special kind of unraveling that comes when you think you know what you’re doing but nothing works. It’s not the panic of being new, it’s the panic of it feeling new even though you’ve done it before. Claire kept parenting through muscle memory that no longer applied, reaching for techniques like they were familiar kitchen drawers, only to find someone had moved all the cutlery.

The guilt hit harder too. Not the low background hum of guilt that came with motherhood, but the kind that sat in her chest and stomach and throat all at once. While she fumbled her way through the newborn fog, Ava was watching, waiting, pulling at her shirt while she held Leo and said “just a minute” for the nineteenth time. Claire saw it in her daughter’s face. That quiet shift when a child realises something has changed and isn’t sure where they fit anymore.

Ava started regressing in small ways… meltdowns at bedtime, wanting to be carried, declaring she was the baby now. Claire tried to be patient, tried to respond how the parenting apps told her she should, but there were days when her voice went sharp anyway, and nights when she lay awake and whispered sorry to a sleeping Ava.

But there was one thing she had this time that she hadn’t before. She knew it was a phase. It would end. There was light, or at least a shower maybe, at the end of the tunnel.

The first time, it had felt like forever. That blurry, milk-sour version of life had stretched ahead like it might never shift. Claire had wondered if she’d ever feel like herself again. If the old her was gone, swallowed whole by sleep deprivation and spit-up. But now she knew better. She knew she’d sleep again. That her hands would be free again. That she’d grow into this new skin just like she did with Ava.

She knew the fog would lift. Not all at once, but slowly, like mist warming off glass.

That knowing didn’t fix anything, but it helped. It gave her something to grip in the worst hours. A thread to follow when she couldn’t see the path.

It also let her notice the moments that would have passed unseen last time.

Like the first time she made it outside with both of them. It was just to the backyard, but it felt like crossing an ocean. Leo in the carrier, Ava on her balance bike. The sun was out, Leo was squirming, Ava was yelling about a flower that looked like a fairy. Claire stood in the grass with both of them, and it felt like a triumph. A silly, everyday, feat. It was the kind of success no one else would understand unless they’d lived it, too.

Or the quieter moments, like when Leo finally settled, face pressed against her neck, breath warm and faintly milky, and his droopy eyes looked up at her, really looked, and she saw that familiar flicker. It wasn’t Ava’s face exactly, but something shared. His own rhythm, own weight, own fierce opinions about silence and socks.

She noticed changes in herself too. Like how she could now hold a screaming baby and still zip up Ava’s jumper. Or the way she could predict both of their meltdowns with eerie accuracy. And the way she failed, too. But also recovered. Not easily, but faster.

Leo was his own kind of hard, and that made it feel new, in a familiar way.

But she was still standing.