Mother of the Year

Well, I imagine my nomination got retracted yesterday. What a day! I should preface all this by saying that what you're about to read does not reflect the standards of the house you grew up in. That's probably why I was especially horrified. We have a very sick cat at the moment, one who probably shouldn't have been allowed to get this sick, and so we suddenly have a whole lot of new challenges that I really don't need at the moment! And something horrendous has happened to my stomach in the last six weeks or so, guaranteeing that at least four days a week, I have horrible stomach pain and an urgent need for a bathroom at least four times a day. Yet another challenge that I don't need at the moment....

Anyway, we started home from a long weekend in WV, with bad weather looming, and most of the trip went smoothly. I think you were fed up from a disrupted schedule so you didn't nurse much, and I was clearly fed up from a disrupted schedule because my stomach was killing me. I had to stop about an hour and a half from home to be sick, and you were happy to sit in your car seat and smile cheerfully and encouragingly at me, which helped. Then about 50 miles from home, you were just so hungry you couldn't stand it any more, so I made it to our exit and stopped to nurse.

Fed you in the corner of a truckstop parking lot while my stomach started raging again and the snow was coming down. I didn't think I was going to make it to the bathroom, so I drove across the parking lot with you in my lap, grabbed you and the diaper bag and rushed into the bathroom. In the plus column, it was a single contained bathroom, but in the minus, there was no changing table. None. But I was too sick to wait, so I had no choice but to put your blanket down on the floor and lay you down. On a truckstop bathroom floor. I know, I know.... Take heart - at least when you have children, I'll not be harping about "putting my grandchildren in that filthy blah, blah, blah," but telling you, "Oh, don't worry about that pacifier - I changed you once on the floor of a truckstop bathroom and you didn't get typhoid!" Got you changed, crouched down and at arm's length because my boots were wet and I was shedding clumps of snow all over the tile floor around you, got back in the car and made it the last few miles home, but in retrospect, it might have been a more peaceful evening if we'd just slept in the parking lot for the night and then kept driving west.

My New Mother, Google

I have no idea how I could have been a mother without being a librarian. We'd still be trying to get you out of the car seat! There was just so much I didn't know and no one I felt comfortable asking. Besides, I have, and I hope you've not inherited it, a deep-seated dislike to being told what to do. I don't like to let anyone tell me what to do. If I'm making a new soup, I'll find three different recipes and combine them. If I've got something to make, I'll shop around for different ideas and come up with my own take. When I was in college, I didn't research and form a viewpoint on a topic. I formed a viewpoint and then found quotes that agreed with me. Terrible, I know, but it's how I do things. And so, I'm most comfortable with tracking down a whole bunch of viewpoints, sifting through them for bits of common sense, threads of common philosophy, and snippets of research, to come up with an approach.

I really should have kept track of my Google history, because my searches over the last five months - actually over the last seventeen months - detail virtually ever question, dilemma, or irrational fear I've had. We could start in the summer of 2009 with searches about planning for pregnancy, appropriate vitamin supplements and folic acid levels. Then we move into basal body temperature tracking, luteal phase information, and sample charts. (This phase was repeated over and over. No matter how confident I was in my math, the months of September, October, November, and December found me lying in bed late at night constantly counting and subtracting days in my head before getting up to double-check the number of days in the various phases of menstruation with a Google search. I had a calendar and a thermometer within arm's reach for weeks!) Then came days of searching for how early pregnancy can be detected, what first trimester symptoms there might be, and how I might recognize them.

Of course, after I confirmed I was pregnant, I searched for cute ways to tell your grandparents, what to expect at neonatal appointments, and a practice with midwives and a history of noninterference. For most of pregnancy, my searches fall into two categories - planning and panicking. I planned and planned. I searched for lists of questions to ask potential midwives, I researched birth costs and induction rates, I read up on the recommended supplements. And then, mostly late at night, I panicked. Sometimes it was because I had symptoms of something, but sometimes it was because of the near lack of symptoms. What are late-term miscarriage rates? Is my baby moving enough? Can my baby be moving too much? Am I gaining enough weight? What can I do if I'm gaining too much? Hours and hours of searching, reading accounts of strange concerns and even stranger side effects.

And then my due date came....

Flotation Device

You are my sunshine. I never knew how true those words were, just thought of "Sunshine" as another nickname or endearment like Peanut or Baby Girl, but I mean that in the purest, truest sense. You are the light in my days. Your little face in the morning, smiling next to mine as you wake up, sopping wet and starving hungry, but smiling anyway, is like the sun peeping over the trees. When I'm paused in my work, looking around as I think something over, your small self, pink-nested next to me, is like the burst of bright light when the clouds shift away. And when you cuddle up next to me at night, take a few pulls on your pacifier and sniff a small, contented sigh, it's the same peaceful closing of the day that sunset offers. I track your presence as devotedly as any sunflower ever tracked the progress of the sun across the sky.

It feels a bit backwards, to be so dependent on you. I like for you to be happy, of course, but even when you're not, your presence offers a purpose, an anchor, that keeps me from drifting off course during my day. Even when you're red-faced and in full voice, most of the time I'm thinking, "Oh, she's experimenting with the new vocal ranges she's discovered!" I'm a bit frightened about how I'll manage this when the day comes that my decisions will make you displeased, but I think that's how it goes with mothering - I'll know the necessity of that decision in the bigger picture while you'll only sense the frustration of it in the moment. Right now, we bob through our days, treading water together, doing our best to keep our heads above water, and I'm never certain who depends most on whom, but I cling tightly to you and somehow, we manage to stay afloat.

Our society seems, at the moment, to value pushing babies away from us at lightning speed. You're born and we commence immediately to push you toward adulthood - we want you to sleep alone, to sit up, to walk, to feed yourself. Maybe this is because I came to all this later, but I'm contented to savor it. I'm pretty sure you'll be feeding yourself before you start kindergarten. No doubt, you'll be sleeping through the night in your own bed before you start high school. You came into the world with a little map all your own, and I don't think we're at the point where I need to be yanking it from your hands, shouting directions and pushing you to get wherever it is you're going faster. The sun finds its way across the sky, and I'm certain that with less guidance from me than I'd like to believe, you will too.