Last week, I got my first haircut (a trim) since the baby came. I feel like I should be a grown-up now that I'm a mom, but I found out that I still stink at salon small talk.
In an attempt to make conversation, I often end up asking stylists how long they've been cutting hair--not a question you can repeat at every visit. So, I've had my hair cut at lots of different places.
I really liked this last stylist, though; she cut my hair EXACTLY the way I wanted it done. But she had zero to say, even when I asked her about her kid and her summer plans. I left with questions: Am I not hip enough? Could she smell my conversational fear? And should I have her cut my hair again? Or just go back to cutting my own bangs and shaking my fist at the mirror when I cut them uneven and too short?
speaking of firsts
everything's new
Baby girl is still new, so everything we do is a first, either for her (first smile, first hike, first trip to Ikea) or for us (first time we've felt okay about another person throwing up her dinner on us). A few highlights:
- First day at church. We dressed her in the gorgeous blessing dress my mother made 16 years ago when my little sister was born. And when baby girl's diaper could not contain her poop, I somehow saved the dress.
- We took baby gummi to her first craft fair to check out pretty pillows and paintings made by two of the loveliest ladies I know. She got a sweet nap in the stroller. And I got a belt made out of ties that makes my post-pregnant self feel skinny (it wraps around me twice!).
- My first Mother's Day. My brother (who just got back from India) gave the best Mother's Day talk I've ever heard. I had little tears in my eyes. And the other speaker? I couldn't tell whether or not he was trying to make women in the congregation feel like maternal failures for not raising ten children on the frontier as second wives.
- First time I've been without a camera for this long. Apparently, ordering a battery charger from Singapore is a bad idea, regardless of how much money it will save you. Ever since our camera battery died for good two weeks ago, we've taken lots of pictures with my laptop. How did I manage to snap a picture of baby girl's smile with Photobooth? Let's just say it's the first time she has ever heard me sound quite so goofy.
magic numbers
More than one veteran mother told me that six is a magic number: six weeks of new baby and then life will start to feel normal again. We must be slow learners at our house because today marks eight weeks since baby girl joined us. But regardless of the exact number, those mothers were right. Today I feel like I'm finally catching my breath. Today I feel more like myself. Today I'm loving this motherhood thing.
we did it for the photo op
We almost didn't go to graduation. Reasons?
- We technically graduated 4 months ago, before Christmas break, when there were no graduation ceremonies.
- Cap and gown rental fees seem like a racket after you've already paid your four years' tuition.
- My husband often scoffs at pomp and authority (and so also, possibly, at "Pomp and Circumstance"). He initially didn't look forward to the fancy hats, color-coded tassles, and terrible parking.
But one of my favorite pictures of myself as a little girl was taken on my dad's graduation day. I wanted a picture like that for our baby girl. Possibly for tradition's sake. Or possibly to have proof to show her when she's a teenager (and thinks she knows everything) that she has smart parents. Caps and gowns make us look like we know something.
Which is probably why I didn't take some of the other, non-smarty-pants pictures that I should have that afternoon:
- The mess I made when I didn't put the lid on the bottle correctly so all the milk we brought spilled in the diaper bag
- The spot where I would have gotten lost (on a campus I've known for years) if other people hadn't insisted I was going the wrong way
- Or the moment we had to break into the car because I'd locked the keys inside
last night, when I sat down to feed the baby again...
Him: Didn't you just barely feed her?
Me: More or less. She ate two-and-a-half hours ago.
Him: Wow. That went fast.
I couldn't agree with him more. I feel like I've entered a zone where time is accelerated—no, not accelerated, just radically altered.
For instance, I know exactly how many days this baby has been alive (29), and exactly how many days until my brother comes home from a two-year mission in India (only 2 now!). But my mom has often had to tell me what day it is when she's come to see how I'm doing. And I failed to wish some important people happy birthday—not because I forgot their birthdays, but because I failed to really grasp that it was April until 3:30 this morning. Hello, folks—we're almost halfway through the month.
She looks so harmless. Who knew she was capable of bending time?
someone's nesting. and it isn't me.
She's a bird. I've named her Molly. And she wants to build a nest in my dryer vent.
We hear her scratching around in there some mornings and then she leaves, which means she isn't trapped. Molly's smart: our dryer vent is the perfect place to build a nest. It's two stories up, with a little hood over it on the outside that would protect baby birdies from rain or sun. It's completely enclosed—and, I imagine, very warm.
Unfortunately, it's also our dryer vent, which means we need to clear it out.
But I feel a delusional sort of sympathy for her. I did some nesting of my own not that long ago. And I probably would have attacked anyone who barged into my little nest and destroyed my hard work. Poor Molly.
Perhaps it's a fitting tribute to her that we decorated baby girl's room in birds.
Pooped On
I've been pooped on. This week. So has K, twice. Changing diapers can be dangerous.
Our little bundle of joy has earned the nickname "squirtle" or "torpedo-girl."
I call this her Calvin and Hobbes face.
Compare:
the physicality of motherhood
I think I'm going to say something about the universe collapsing because I don't know a better way to write about the birth of our gummi bear.
I could give you a play-by-play chronology: labor started Sunday morning at 10:30, water broke at 1am on Monday (10 minutes after we finished watching the episode of The Office when Pam has her baby), and baby girl arrived 7 hours later. But that feels insufficient somehow.
Anything I say will feel insufficient. People I love and trust tried to prepare me with good advice (and I took most of it), but some things, I had no way to know. Some things aren't easily described.
I prepared mentally for labor: we went to a lamaze class, I practiced some breathing techniques and visualizations. I thought I would distract myself from pain, go somewhere else in my mind when the time came. But once we arrived at the hospital and the contractions stepped up, I realized the whole experience would be a bit more physical than I imagined.
I'm a girl who lives in her own head—enough that I occasionally forget that the rest of me exists. I often run into doors and counter corners. I trip over things I don't notice (including my own feet). Before I got pregnant, I sometimes forgot to eat.
But I could not ignore any part of my body the closer I got to delivery. I needed things I didn't expect to. Christopher's physical presence became the most important thing in the world to me. I needed his hand on my cheek. I asked him to sing, which made him promptly forget every song he's ever known, so he made up his own words. He was a champ.
To cope for those last few hours, I squeezed his other hand, closed my eyes and thought of body parts. I imagined my baby's fingers and toes, one at a time, that I would get to see soon. I pictured her eyes, her elbows, her belly, her bum.
Normally, I can sense the space around me when I close my eyes, which is what I sensed during most contractions that night. I could sense the size of the room and hear people moving around in it. But that changed during the last push, a few seconds before our little girl came out to meet us.
I had been told about the "ring of fire," and that I should be grateful for it if I didn't have an epidural because it meant the end was coming. I wanted to process it like that—to recognize it by its name and description. But words skipped town at that point.
When I closed my eyes during those interminable seconds, I felt like the space around me shrank. The universe collapsed to a single point that contained me and two opposites: dark, burning pain and the hopeful, encouraging sound of my husband's voice. I have zero memory of what that voice said, but I know I needed it.
And then, there she was, with her eyes wide open, like that whole 21-hour process surprised her just as much as it had surprised me. Like she was surprised that our bodies had just gone through all that.
When they whisked her away to Apgar her, I figured that was it: we did it! I wasn't entirely prepared to discover that the physicality of being a mother didn't end there.
For instance, people warned me about the baby blues. I understood what they said in the abstract, like any weepiness I might experience would be purely hormonal or emotional, which in large part it is.
But there's something much more physical behind the emotions I've felt for the last two weeks. I was torn in half and sewn back up again. I ache and cramp and sag in places I didn't before and hadn't really realized that I would. Healing is more painful and takes a bit longer than I anticipated. I'll never sleep as much as I want to again.
At the same time, though, happiness feels more tangible than it ever has in my entire life. It's physically manifest in this tiny person who didn't even exist at this time last year, in the little grunts she makes while she sleeps, in the hand she wraps around my finger and won't let go, in the way she quiets right down when her daddy (who is enamored with her) scoops her up and rocks her. Everything she needs is so concrete: feeding and diapering and bathing and kissing and snuggling. These last two weeks, it's like our universe has shrunk a second time and she's become the lovely center of it. We wouldn't have it any other way.
motherhood will teach me this again, won't it
I made a long list of things I needed (read: wanted) to accomplish before the baby came.
Then the universe laughed at me. No, our gummi bear did not come early. I just got super sick. I've spent the last week moving from my bed to my couch and back again, with detours to the bathroom for more tissues and throat lozenges.
And the list?
Maybe it was a bit ambitious—even for a healthy pregnant lady. Looks like I planned on sewing, cooking, cleaning, writing, and decorating everything in the universe until the second the baby crowned. I'm working on deleting some items from the list.
I do this often: make plans too big for any person and then feel disappointed when I find out I'm not superhuman. Kind of like this little frustration:
I took on a project I wasn't prepared for, with instructions that were difficult to follow, and expected myself to finish in an afternoon. It eventually turned out, but only after weeks of tearing out seams and sewing them back up again crooked. I probably should have re-evaluated my progress halfway through and just gone to the store to buy a stupid diaper bag like a normal person.
I have a feeling that motherhood will demand that I re-evaluate and abandon overblown plans more often than I currently do. Just like this week's virus made me chuck my list, my little gummi bear will do the same when she throws up or falls down or just wants me to put down the to-do list to cuddle with her. I hope I figure it out.