Six Months!

Woohoo! You've been here six months! Six whole months and it seems like years and years, but in a good way. I look at all we've learned over the past six months, and I don't know who to be more impressed with. Okay, I'm more impressed with you, but only because you didn't have access to the internet. :)

I've learned so much about you. I've been reading Bill Bryson's memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and he talks about how intimately you know the world as a child, and it struck a chord with me, because I remember knowing my childhood world that way. I knew how many stairs there were down to the basement, what the gas furnace sounded like when it clicked on, how many times Mom would answer the phone on Saturday morning before getting out of bed, the number of tiles on my bedroom ceiling and where the brown water stains were, how long I could run the garden hose before getting caught, where the warped spots were on the ping-pong table in my grandparents' basement, what name to call your uncle to start a fight. I knew the smells of everything: my grandpa's workshirts, the cabinet under the sink, the loft in the garage, my grandmother's lotion, my mother's perfume, the hot plastic smell of our Buick in summer, the burners on the gas stove. (This, by the way, is why you'll someday be annoyed with the "I don't remembers" you get from all adults in your life; you'll not be able to fathom how such a fundamental understanding of our world slipped away from us. I can't either.)

But now, suddenly, I know something so microscopically again: you.


I know with the kind of knowing I had in childhood, the kind of knowing that one does without even thinking. I know when you're hungry and when you're probably wet, how your hair bunches up on the top of your head and how the broken ends of your balding spot on the back of your head feel crispy, how you'll smile when you try to sit up and fall back, how you poke your tongue out one way when you're hungry and one way when you're happy and another way when you're thinking hard, how you lick your fingers when you're pensive and thoughtful, when hoots are just hums and when they're a forebearer of fussiness, how your small hands drift around like delicate ocean creatures in a current while you're nursing, how you seem to swim upward through dark water when you're waking and float down gently into sleep like you're being borne out on a tide. All this knowing makes me feel so accomplished, so connected and aware, as if my very observation makes me part of something.

And my body's changed nearly as dramatically as yours has! I've lost not only the weight that pregnancy brought, but nearly an additional 30 pounds from nursing you. And nursing you! Hours and hours and pain upon pain, but we've made six whole months! Only 20% of mamas and babies make it to six months (and I can safely say I know why...) so I congratulate myself privately. (This is one of the tricky things about motherhood. To congratulate myself publicly would be, perhaps, to make people who weren't able to accomplish the same thing feel inadequate. This is unreasonable. I couldn't run the Boston Marathon, but I'd have no trouble feeling happy for a friend who could. You're learning a great deal, but you'll still discover that people will remain a mystery....) Anyway, I make milk, a quart or more a day! A quart - miraculous, amazing body. There'll come a time someday, despite my best efforts, when you'll hate things about your body. It will just happen. You'll develop some irrational grudge against the pores on your nose or the inconsistencies of your hairline or the shape of the nail beds on your big toes. But when you do, know that if you someday choose to be a mother, you'll stand in awe of your body and all it can accomplish. You'll realize that you were just looking at the outside of it, like looking at the body of a car and judging the scrapes and dents on the fender instead of reveling in the power of the 427 V-8 hidden inside. (And P.S., you'll know plenty of boys who only do the same thing and they'll be just as dumb as anyone who buys a shiny car without bothering to find out if it even runs....) Believe me, motherhood may well be the first time you appreciate the true power of your body.

But enough about me - look at you! I've observed and documented and analyzed, but you've just flat-out learned! Your mastery of your hands improves every day and more and more often they seem to do your bidding right away. Your little back with its tiny knobbly spine, like rosary beads rippling under my fingers, gets stronger every day, more upright and independent from one morning to the next. You've learned that you don't need to wait for things to enter your world, to be offered to you or put in your hand, but that you can reach out, even lean forward, and take what you want for yourself. You've learned the fundamental connection created by a smile and you seek it out over and over again, smiling until you get a smile in exchange and then smiling even more. You came with an awareness of emotional comfort, wanting the security of me, but you're developing an awareness of physical comfort as well, resting your cheek again my shoulder, dropping your head forward on my arm. You practice opening and closing your wee fist, kicking your foot out over and over, rocking your legs up and down, all with incredible diligence and dedication, as if you can feel results with each movement, as if you have some regimen or goal already in mind. It's amazing that you were born a tiny, nearly immobile blip a mere six months ago, and yet you've not remained that. You came with some invisible little fire that you've been tending, some inner imperative to become something, even as you can't possibly understand your thumbs, let alone your humanity and your future self. I'm in awe every single day, and it's only been six months!