Overview
I am the admin for a listserv for parents in the area, and we've had a lot of pregnant people or people with tiny babies join. I always want to say, "You won't need anything from the listserv for a good few months (which will seem like a long time from now to you)." For the adults, the first while of parenting is nothing but a giant shock as you are sliced into smaller and smaller pieces, realizing the full import of twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, without end. And having the final say over an utterly helpless life for whom you would happily cut off your arm but with whom you cannot communicate. Fortunately at some point the infallible method to solve your apparent riddle becomes obvious.
I must explain it with a metaphor. If you imagine your normal energy or life force as water, and what we call our self as a bag of water which can be fuller or emptier, then the trick to kids is to take a knife out and slash the bag and pour out the water onto your family. When the water is gone and it is an easy day, it will be nap time or even bed time. Often, though, it will just be 2 in the afternoon. Then you just get out the handy kitchen knife and cut the bag into little pieces and hand them out (if you have three kids or great wisdom from some other source, you probably make paper boats or paper hats out of the pieces of bag). On your face is a smile and a gentle laugh at your old idea of being limited. At some point another day or another adult shows up, and before you even mull over what happened, there is within you a new bag of life force to pour out.
What this pouring of water out means varies as the situation demands. Sometimes a baby just needs to be held for a few days or weeks to help it adjust to the oddity of life out here. Sometimes their pinky toe is twisted by their cute little sock and you have to trust their crying is something important until you strip off all their clothes and find the poor little toe. Sometimes a traveling toddler just needs to hear a new story about the big mayor and the little elf and the flying carpet every 15 minutes until the flight is over. Once you see the solution to your situation, you either give in or try to compromise with it. Just set the baby down until it starts up again. Or "One story and then play with this truck for a while." Then soon the baby starts crying or kicking the seat in front and you then recognize that what seemed like a fear (of holding the baby upside down while walking around humming and dipping the head down and to the left every third beat for hours and hours with the baby protesting each break or telling stories until your head hurts from your amazing, unrecognized feat of literary output) was not your fear at all but your intuition showing you the way. And so you just do what is needed, walking or story telling as it may be (it's not always so active - sometimes it's just sitting and holding a baby; soon it's sitting and watching someone try a difficult task and offer nothing but attentive watching). You'll be tired also but really too tired to worry about fatigue, or at least once the work is flowing pretty well, and you start having worries about how tired you feel, you will have to stop because some new task has come up. Now it is time to carry the baby upside down humming and dipping every third beat, and also time to try to pick up and eat a bowl of now cold pasta so you can keep holding the baby rather than faint from hunger, but this picking up and eating is hard to do without interrupting the happy baby rhythm. But you manage. You learn how to see what this baby needs and what you actually need (which is surprisingly little but not nothing), and you get practiced in doing those things because by God they need doing.
And the next time you are awake while the child sleeps, you sit, tired, uncertain and so pleased, and know you will find a full bag of life force waiting just when it is needed. Some people will get mad at my description here, and I know most parents with most babies can't avoid crying babies and can't avoid doing things that in retrospect were obvious errors. My point isn't that you give until you hurt yourself; it is that when you need to give, you will know how to give and you can give. It just pours out. Children give you super powers.
In my world, coffee helps too :)