The Modern Mom

Some days, I can't even tell you how I did it. I'm not saying that to toot my own horn, or to tell you how wonderful I am. I just can't remember how I actually did everything I needed to do. There are nights when it's up and down and bottle and diaper and I am such a light sleeper these days (since motherhood) that there are mornings when I wake up and I feel like I didn't sleep at all. And then her nose is running and I check inside her mouth to see if she started teething again, and I am wiping her nose with my bare hand and trying to get her to hold still while I change her diaper and she's wanting to stand up. And I notice her diaper is soaked through and through but I don't have time to throw her in the bath before I leave for work, so I'm grabbing wet wipes like they're going out of style and wiping her legs and her belly and powdering her up while I'm trying to find pants and something with sleeves because I worry about her running nose. And I work and I miss her while at work, and I rush home on the bus and she is eating her lunch and then she runs in the living room and touches every piece of technology she knows she's not supposed to touch. And we are tired and sit on the couch and watch Sesame Street for probably too long, but it's the only thing we feel like doing, and we walk around the house like we do. And the window in my bedroom is cracked open and I show her the tree outside and it is changing color and dancing in the wind and I realize I am standing with her in that moment, just standing there watching that tree dance, and I am reminded of why people have children in the first place.

  

Walk On By

I wish I could remember who said it, but somewhere someone said, "I can remember when my daughter walked across a room for the very first time." I think I read it when my own daughter was a baby and it stuck with me because I wondered when she'd walk and what it would feel like. I knew I had a late walker on my hands because I didn't walk until I was a good 18 months, and my child has pork chop thighs and an affinity for reading and no real desire to move. Crawling has never appealed. She's been walking small steps for two months now, holding onto our hands. A couple of days ago, she took a few steps back and forth between my husband and me in the kitchen. But today she blazed through the kitchen. One wall to the other. Hands out in front of her like a baby Frankenstein. Back and forth. Sturdy as a tank. I felt undeniably proud of her, and undeniably terrified, and now I am trying not too think too hard about it as I collapse on the sofa for the remainder of the evening (or the rest of my life).

Look! There's a DOG!

On Monday morning, I was walking to the bus stop on my way to work and a man with a dog was approaching and I literally almost said aloud, "Look! There's a DOG!" I certainly thought it in my head. Because Bonnie loves dogs, and most of my time is spent with Bonnie, and we like to talk about everything we see. If I would have said, "Look! There's a DOG!" aloud, it would have sounded insane, because what woman in her mid-thirties does that walking to the bus stop on her way to work. It made me think about myself and the person I am becoming. It made me think about myself as a woman in this world. A woman with a child. A mother. But it also made me think about myself as a woman in this world with an identity apart from my child, apart from being a mother. It made me think about how Bonnie and Robert and I have been watching these fantastic episodes of Sesame Street from the '70's, and how every song that ever gets stuck in my head lately is a preschooler song from Sesame Street. Robert and I used to talk nonstop about music, about new bands we were listening to, and shows in Seattle, and what was good and what was not good. I used to spend hours at home and at work listening to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel and now it's sometimes people like that, but most of the time not. I think what I'm trying to say is, I have this very real fear of losing myself in my role as a mother and becoming nothing but a woman in her mid-thirties saying "Look! There's a DOG!" out loud on the street and hearing nothing but Sesame Street songs play in my head for the rest of my life. Robert and I used to be members of an independent film theater downtown and we would see everything. We would do nothing on weekends but sleep and read. I know that one day I'll get my brain back, and I'll know what's good and not good and watch all the films in the theater again, and one day I'll wake up and my daughter will want to spend all her time on weekends with friends and not with me. And I will remember this time we shared just the two of us, the hush of early mornings and long stroller walks to the park and all the desperate Starbucks trips and dishes and laundry and bags of diapers and an overflowing dumpster and I will cry.   

Here In This World

Once she was born, I was never not afraid.

Joan Didion
Blue Nights



I didn't understand the weight of the worry, but it can crush you if you let it. If you are only responsible for yourself, your own life, then you understand that you can make stupid decisions and return from them. You can move forward and learn from them. But it all starts with the late nights looking over her crib trying to hear her breathe, and the panicked feeling of placing your hand on her tiny chest to make sure you can actually feel it moving up and down. It happens when you pull her arm through her pajamas and she squawks and you know you pulled too tight and you feel badly about it long after you should, when she bonks her head for the first time after slipping out of your arms and you ask your husband if you should worry about her being concussed, when you wake up the following morning to find the bruise blooming yellow and blue and you know it happened on your watch. It happens when you wait at a crosswalk on Northwest Avenue and look down at her sleeping face and know that you are the person who can't let go. You are the one who needs to get her safely to the other side. It is a weight, daily, constant, and it is something I have to surrender by the minute, and it is something that will never go away because she is here in this world.

Grandiose

Documentation

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. 

Joan Didion



After having Bonnie, I have been particularly compulsive about writing everything down. I've been a maniac about writing things down. Many writers keep notebooks, but it was never a practice I made my own with any sort of consistency. I would make lists, write down dates and events, in waves and seasons and then I'd put the pen down and walk away from it. But not with Bonnie. 

I want to remember all of it and I already feel like I am forgetting it. I want to have the answers for her when she one day asks when her first tooth started budding, if ever she asks when her first tooth started budding. I am afraid I haven't taken enough photos of her, which is absurd because I am constantly taking photos of her. This need for documentation is, in part, my desire to have the answers for her one day, but it is also for myself, and the need to have it all and keep it all close to me for as long as I can. I never imagined it would be this way, but when the nurse placed Bonnie on my chest for the first time, the thought that came to me was of a sort of sadness: "she's never going to be this small again."

The Queen of Sheba

When I was preparing Bonnie's room for her grand entry into the world, I wanted everything white and cream and clean. I wanted a white crib, a white changing table, cream sheepskin rugs, cream quilts, everything fluff and down and beautiful. I agonized over the placement of everything and made sure everything was just right, like I was birthing the Queen of Sheba, and then the reality of the constant bodily fluids and the mere spit-up hit (literally) and it was nonstop laundry and wiping the floors and wiping her face and getting fresh linens and throwing her in the bath and staining things and throwing things away. I am sort of in love with the fact that I was planning on pampering her and giving her the treatment of The Ritz, and it's really just one small example of how I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into.

The Grocery

Before having a baby, I went to the grocery store from time to time when I was hungry and needed food. After a baby, the grocery store has become a very important event. I go there daily.  Sometimes I go there more than once daily. The checkers know me and they know my baby. I know where to find everything I need and I know that in the morning, the grocery store music is the worst music in the whole world (I previously worked full-time and never grocery shopped in the morning). It is where Phil Collins lives.

Before having a baby, I could get in and out of the grocery store without having a conversation. After a baby, I get stopped by everyone and people share stories and guess how old she is and comment on her clothing and tell me about their family and show me photos of their children and grandchildren on their phones. People carrying small dogs in the grocery store come up to us and the baby and the dogs say hello. We are sort of celebrities, Bonnie and I. 


  

That Small

Slowly she'd calm, and I'd feel beneath my thumb pads her rabbit heart grow steady. Then, at last, she'd be dozing in my arms, worn out. Oh sweet Claire, how I wish I could have you that small in my lap again for just one more milk-breathed nap.

Beth Ann Fennelly
Great With Child

Domesticity

The First Year

Oh, the first year. It is the year of years. There is one thing I wish someone would have told me before I had a baby, and maybe they did but I didn't listen, or maybe they did and I did listen but I've since forgotten, because mom brain. I wish they would have told me that the first year is sort of a year where you have to step away from the rest of the world. It is a time when time slows, and you have to focus on the basics of feeding and sleeping and cleaning and it's really hard to be on a committee or make it on time to a meeting, or call someone back on the telephone. And if you're like me, and 33 years old with a fully established social scene when you have your first baby, it's really like culture shock. But as I round the bend of the first year, I can tell you that the insular feeling of the home and the cocoon and the bonding and the milk was, for me, a very beautiful season that is now changing as my baby grows. I wish they would have told me that it's perfectly alright to hibernate for an entire year, and even longer if you're a different sort of mom, and that the rest of the world understands. They will survive and they will still love you. And you can and will slowly re-emerge back into it all. 

On Keeping House

Wednesday mornings, Bonnie and I wake at the usual time and we look out the window in her bedroom and do the weather report together, then we sit at the breakfast nook in the kitchen and I make myself eggs and we eat breakfast. I catch all the things that fall on the floor and wipe all the food from her face and hands. We take a morning walk around the neighborhood and look at the trees and when she takes her nap I assess the diapers and her food and make sure we have paper towels and toilet paper and soap for the kitchen and the bathroom. And sometimes I go to the yard and pluck fresh flowers and put them in vases and empty the dishwasher and load the dirty dishes to wash, and I check the bank account to see how much money we have and I pay the bills. I might write some lines in the notebook I keep on Bonnie's first year, or I might read a chapter in a book. It is very full and satisfying in a way I never understood. There is very little time to think about myself, which is also a gift I never understood.