Here we are.
Saira is one year old.
We have a toddler. And she’s toddling and babbling and climbing and organizing the shoe cupboard with exponential efficiency.
I’ve been a mother for a year. That’s what I want to talk about tonight in these 45 minutes before my bedtime and while I drink my red wine. It’s a ramble, a journey of words, a stream of consciousness, so welcome to the madness which is my tired brain at 8:15 p.m.
She is not my hardest job.
Sure, she’s exasperating and exhausting at times and sometimes I wordlessly hide from her in the bathroom, and usually at one point during every day she gives me opportunity to meditatively escape her newfound habit of screaming at me, but she is not my hardest job.
I’ve had harder. I’ve had worse.
No other job has loved me this innocently and affectionately. No other job has given me afternoon nap snuggles or middle-of-playtime hugs and kisses. No other job has held my face in tiny hands, and no other job has looked at me as though I am the most beautiful and mesmerizing creature.
She is work. She is tough mental energy. She is physically demanding.
Still not my hardest job.
Being a parent is a shitshow.
I don’t know how else to say this. Total shitshow.
Two days ago she spit out a spoonful of food and it dribbled down her bare belly, and we called our dog over to eat it off of her.
Yesterday she drooled in my cup of coffee. I kept drinking it (duh).
Today my husband checked her diaper and (surprise!) stuck two fingers in poop.
A few weeks ago, I had a situation with a naked baby, two dogs and four piles of baby poop on the floor. I can’t tell you what happened – it’s too much. My husband doesn’t even know.
In what universe is any of these most recent examples OK?
In the parenting universe, and as afore-mentioned, shitshow.
Mothering epiphanies were few and far between.
During this first year, I had no real spiritual breakthroughs. I know a lot of people who equate spiritual lessons with mothering, and I get it from a cognitive point of view, but, I’ll be honest with you, I felt hashtag blessed that she was fed and happy. Some days that was about all I had mental energy for (also taking into account my work and our travel schedule).
The day I realized this, I was in the bathroom, and I was like, “Huh, this is not yet a spiritual experience for me,” and there was an initial moment of “oh shit, is this SUPPOSED to be a spiritual experience,” and then I became tired and decided that her being fed and happy and my work being satisfied was enough for the moment.
Speaking of epiphanies, I had one today.
I was trailing her at the playground today. She was discovering sand and swings and teeter-totters and this random climbing/shaking thing, which she climbed and shook on. I was nearby, obviously. She’s a year old. Small for her age (genetics, our Indian pediatrician said. “Don’t compare her to her American counterparts when you get back to the US.”) Anyway, she was exploring, I was nearby, but my hands were mostly off of her.
My job was to provide the opportunity, lay forth the options and then facilitate discovery within the realm of safety. (The definition of safety is subjective and admittedly my definition is looser than say, my husbands.) My job is not to control her mode of discovery. For example, she was WAY more interested in the mechanism of the teeter-totter than she was in actually teeter-tottering. Great. As long as there aren’t sharp rusty edges that could cut off a finger or poke an eye out, figure that shit out.
Guys, it would be WAY easier for me if she did things the way my 35-year-old self preferred, but I am not the point. She is. And yeah, there are definitely times when I pull the mom-card for selfish reasons (no, I don’t want to stand here while you swing through the kitchen door for the 100th time in an hour and shove your whole hands in the hinges), but within the framework of playtime, she calls most of the shots.
Warding off future frustrations is a win.
“Are you going to be mad if she pees on Tuck’s bed in his crate?”
Time out. This was a real question. Two things she loves: naked-baby-time and playing in Tuck’s giant dog crate. These are things we just don’t fight over, and in fact, I use them to my advantage. Need to print/sign/scan documents to send back to our realtor in the States? Take the kid to the dog crate which is in the office, set her loose, get stuff done. I do this all the time, and sometimes I just sit on the floor with my coffee.
Anyway. Back to peeing on Tuck’s bed.
“Yes,” he replied. “That means I’ll have to take off the cloth part, wash it, dry it, reassemble it all later tonight…”
“OK, then I’m putting a diaper on her as we speak.”
Future frustration = gone.
It’s like going to a haunted house.
Being a mother is like going to a haunted house with your best friend (“hold my hand, I’m so scared, I’m so glad you’re with me!”) and then discovering the best friend is the one haunting you. How does this translate into my every day life? Staring adoringly into her face which is staring adoringly back at me and then out offuckingnowhere her face contorts into an almost unrecognizable squint and she is screaming at me over a piece of watermelon. I think?
Full disclosure, it’s past my bedtime on the second night of writing this.
I meant to finish this today during her predictable 2-hour nap, but what has been predictable detoured today into an unpredictable 3-hour nap with the two of us curled up together with our heads at the foot end of the bed.
Why were we napping together? Because it’s the only way she’d sleep today and she needed a good nap.
Why were our heads at the foot end of the bed? Because she fell asleep nestled in the crook of my right arm and in order for us to continue sleeping peacefully, I needed to lay on my right side. And why couldn’t I lay on my right side on the left side of the bed? Because our man was napping on that side (his side).
Anyway, today was great. A great, fulfilling day of mothering in which I was duly smothered by tiny-arm hugs and mango-pulpy kisses. There was a dash of tired tears, a generous sprinkling of her shouting at me (watermelon?), pure exasperation by 9 a.m. (why are meals so hard?), some mommy-gritting of the teeth, and also, I shit you not, I missed her when she was sleeping. It’s the moment I feel like most days are rolling downhill to – the moment of sleep, and then when it’s there in front of me, she’s asleep in my arms, asleep in our bed, asleep in her bed, I breathe this heavy sigh, and I miss her.
Cue: she’s awake from her nap now.
Also, it’s 24 hours later.
This (this writing) should end because I could literally do this for the next infinitive number of days.
But first, another realization I had today while she played outside for an hour:
She is sometimes the most safest when I do not intervene.
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