In Which I Mention Star Wars, a Death March, and Gypsies--Yes, It's About Parenting

I have wrested the computer away from my son's eager hands, and MOTH is distracting him with the Scooba (it's like a Roomba, but for mopping instead of vaccuming), so I have a precious few minutes to write. I've had this week off for spring break, and thus felt confident in my posting-every-day challenge, but somehow it's still hard. I've managed to post, yes, but I haven't gotten to read/comment elsewhere all week, so...anyway, I'm cheating a bit by digging out something I wrote when Tankbaby was about four months old. Consider it a sequel to the enormously loooong and drawn-out birth story. Like The Phantom Menace to Star Wars. Except, you know, without the weirdly racist overtones.

I wrote this in a good moment, one where I was feeling OK about the not-so-much-OK-ness that had permeated the first couple months of parenting. That wasn't, and isn't, always the case. I still struggle mightily with the moments where I feel like I'm losing my shit, where I am so frustrated with this perfect, healthy, vulnerable little boy who is just being a baby. I know that it's normal, I know that I'm not alone, but it feels awful. It feels awful to have such strong negative feelings about the most precious being in your life, the one for whom you'd lay down your life, except you're pretty sure he's going to be the death of you long before you can make the sacrifice. They are flashes and they go away, but these moments are there in parenting, and it's scary to see how close we all are to the abyss in those moments. I felt immediate affection for this guy I met when Tankbaby was about five months old who, within minutes of talking about non-sleeping babies, offered up, "Oh, I TOTALLY get how someone could shake their baby." Because you do. You see how parents, especially those who are young and/or without knowledge and support, could lose it entirely for a minute. I don't understand the whole "wait until your father gets home" thing where you nurse a grudge against your child for hours and then administer physical punishment coldly and methodically (which is ironic, because the people I know who are pro-spanking are often very proud of the fact that "I do it when I'm calm, I never hit out of anger," which to me is waaaay more fucked up), but I can understand losing your nut and reacting out of the monster that lives inside all of us.

Anyway, in hopes that this somehow reaches someone who someday needs a little light at the end of the tunnel, or maybe someone who is continuing to beat themselves up for those awful moments, I offer this:

The First Trimester

When you are first pregnant, the traditional wisdom is that you don’t tell anyone for the first trimester. You’re all excited and want to share the news, but you hold off, lest you get everyone else excited and then Something Bad Happens. The first three months of parenthood are kind of like that, but in reverse. At least for me…I didn’t want to share too much, lest I scare people off from ever having a baby. But now that we’re into the second trimester of parenthood, I feel like I can share.

I was at L’s house today with Tankbaby and he was grinning up at me gummily. I leaned over and said something like, “Oh, man, you are so cute. I’m so glad I kept you, even though at around week five I thought of returning you to sender.” L’s mom said, “You don’t really mean that,” and before I could reply, L said, “Oh yes, she does.” She explained that, when she came to visit during those early weeks, particularly when I was also in the throes of mastitis, I was not smiling and instead resembled a member of the Bataan Death March (um, I might be paraphrasing here).

She’s not wrong. I loved my son pretty instantaneously, but that love came more from an unconscious, biological, hormonal place than the affection I feel for him now. That early love was powerful, but it needed to be in order to outweigh the sleep-deprived, equally-hormone-fueled desire to put the baby in a drawer for a few hours. If possible, a drawer in someone else’s house. On Mars.

So, while I loved my kid, I wasn’t all that crazy about Motherhood at that point. It’s different now, better. I have a chubby baby with big eyes and bigger cheeks and ham thighs who can smile and make eye contact and flirt, instead of a little crying grubworm, with whom the best I could hope to achieve is a state of neutrality, of just being still and quiet. Now, Tankbaby looks for me and follows my motions across a room, and I think I am finally more to him than just the Blur Behind the Boobs. It is all, as the clichés say, totally worth it. But I still remember those early weeks, when I wondered, “What have I done?” and I could look down at this tiny, vulnerable human being and say, “I love you so much. But you know what? If you would sleep a little longer? I could love you MORE.”

I don’t know. Maybe this was just me? But I would respectfully contend that those of you who are parents, if you don’t remember feeling doubt and desperation, feeling like you might want a do-over, feeling like you might well sell that baby to the gypsies in exchange for four hours of sleep or one hot shower, you a) are lying, or b) probably didn’t have a baby, but a houseplant. Think back—were you able to ignore it for long periods of time? If the answer is yes, you probably didn’t have a baby, or at least you shouldn’t have.