Motherhood: A Friday

2/10

We wake a little before 7am. I change her very full diaper, and she sits in her bouncer while I pee. This inspires her to go again so we change her diaper again. After this, she is usually in a good mood long enough for me to make coffee and oatmeal. I place her in her high chair and eat my breakfast around 8am. She likes to watch me eat and play with her pink plastic spoon, shoving the round or slender ends indiscriminately against her gums and hard palate.

My coffee tastes especially good this morning and I can tell I didn’t let the water get too hot like I usually do.

We play on the floor for a bit and I change her diaper again. Around 9am, I relocate us to the plush red chair by the window. She watches cars for a bit while I finish my lukewarm coffee. She reaches down to grab her toy and brings it to her open mouth. I flip through her Richard Scarry book that brings up a vague longing to be a small creature in a gentle forest. There was a place in Colorado that felt kind of like that, near Silverton, where I wandered across flowery meadows and mossy outcrops with her father during our first summer together. We ate tiny wild strawberries, full of sweetness, handing good finds to one another - delightfully generous with our new romance.

She has fallen asleep in my lap, so I read for an hour after snapping a photo of her to join the thousands already taken.

When she wakes, I dress her in sweats gifted by her uncle and we go outside. There is a light rain with small, whispering raindrops, hardly perceptible except for the shuddering of the leaves and the occasional glitter in the air. 

She watches the world from my lap, checking back with me often, resting her head against my cheek. I speak to her about rain and chickweed (growing near our feet) and February (“F-eh-buh-u-wah-ree. February”). 

We come inside when I suspect she’s wet her diaper again, and I’m correct. We play on the floor again, and then I decide to cook lunch. I leave her in her bouncer while I cut onions - she won’t understand why her eyes are hurting if she’s too close to them. Once the onions are in the pot, I put on her carrier. She smiles and reaches up for me with anticipation. She rides along as I mince garlic and ginger and put my little lunch stew together. 

Upon completion, we sit together at the table and she watches me eat again. 

Then I change her diaper, we nurse, and we play a little more. Then we snuggle and look out the window again. She responds to a kiss on her cheek by grabbing a handful of my hair and smushing her open, wet mouth against my face, pleased with her innovation. Another diaper change, and she falls asleep again, this time for half an hour. 

I had hoped she would sleep longer, but she doesn’t know that. We play, but she’s fussier than this morning - she needed to sleep longer, but she doesn’t know that either. After some activity, she’s hungry again. We sit together and nurse, and we look out the window.

It is around this time, 2:30pm, that I start to feel the exertion of tending to a small being alone all day. Two men run by with their dogs, and I feel jealous.

I want to empty my head out onto the carpet. Just tumble it out and be vacant for a while. She gives me a small reprieve by leaning against me and playing with her toy, kicking my calf while I let my head rest on the chair and close my eyes. It doesn’t last long, though, and soon we’re up changing a diaper again. 

I consider the perception of this work. I would say that this way of spending my time is more meaningful, but working outside the home, for me, is easier. At least by the metric of “how spent am I by the end of the day.” 

She falls asleep, and my partner comes home. He gathers her up and I go for a walk in the rain to decompress. It’s nice, but it takes a while to start working.

I stand beneath an oak tree and watch shoes dangle by their laces from the high branches. I remember standing here four and a half years ago, uncertain if I should lean in or not, but determined to try it. I feel warmly toward that younger self, feel almost as though I can see her there. “Hang in there.”

I hope it can stretch back through time and reach her.

On the walk back, I stand beneath a magnolia tree and listen to the clack clack of rain on the candy coated leaves. I try to imagine being a dinosaur on young Earth beneath one of these trees. I liked dinosaurs a lot when I was a little girl, possibly due to all of the dino-heavy movies that came out in the 90s. When I played pretend with friends, I was a T-Rex - specifically, Chomper from Land Before Time 2. I wonder if she’ll like the big bird lizards, too.

When I emerge from the rain into the warm light of home, my beloved is playing with my other beloved. My head is still fuzzy - I might be hungry - but I am glad to see them. 

Dinner, shower, and then bedtime. I get aggressive baby kisses and she nurses and becomes drowsy. And then she is asleep, and I find myself also tempted by sleep at the ripe hour of 8:15pm. I’ll wake a few times tonight, to comfort her or nurse her back to sleep, but she’ll be easy about it. How sensible for a small being to check in with the larger caretaking beings when it is dark and still. 

“I love you,” I’ll whisper. I hope it can stretch forward through time and reach her, always, until the end of all time. I think about lives lived before and after, and I wonder if scientists will ever find a way to recover memories of previous lives, if such a thing can be recovered or even exist at all. I wonder who I might be when I recall this one now. What a wonder, I’ll think to myself before I drift to sleep, as I have thought several times before, that in this lifetime I get to be her mother.

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