Five Months: Pay Attention
We’re five months in! She can tell us what she wants (and doesn’t want). She is babbling “mamamama” and “dadabada.” She is a delight and she is opinionated. She needs us often, which is exactly right.
Here’s what I wrote down from the last month.
1/19/23
Our first time getting somewhere before 9am is a success, at least in terms of getting the baby situated and out the door. It is a failure in terms of that success being useful in any way. I arrived at my appointment and the front desk staff said, “I don’t have you down for an appointment until next week.” And she was right. I came a week early. Whew.
A tooth might be coming in or she’s in a sleep regression. Getting her to sleep at night is taking some retooling and trial and error (again! Just when we thought we had it down). She cries in my arms as I rock her. “I know, my love,” I say in my deep, please-go-to-sleep voice, “This is hard.” Her eyes are squeezed shut in frustration. “Sometimes there are hard parts, and I’m sorry about that,” I say back. “I wish I could have birthed you into paradise.” But then perhaps she need not have come at all.
1/23/23
When I was freshly thirty, I attended a 200 hour yoga teacher training and we talked Gita for several hours over the course of a month. The metaphor of horses as desire steering the chariot (body) toward destruction without the benefit of a competent driver landed for me, at the time. I have also realized that I was considering them, more or less, as desires that lead to some obvious ruinous end, like addiction (or whatever). It didn’t sink in that ruin could happen at any old time over any old thing.
But here I am on the couch with my daughter, who is needing me badly tonight (like last night), and I’m grumpy because I notice wheat toast with my partner’s meal. I think now that I might have wanted toasted sourdough with my lentil soup. I really want it, but I’m stuck here with most of my soup already eaten and my daughter staring up at me, hoping I have the answers. The narration starts about how unfair it is and how hard done I am by all this - where’s MY toast! Goddamnit! I want some fucking toast!
That’s when I realize.
You fool! You absolute doodoo goblin.
Here it is.
The chariot has run off in the direction of butter and bread and here is your daughter, alive and healthy and needing you.
Pay attention!
My whole posture shifts when I put my attention on how beautiful she is. How much I love her.
Young one, I am so grateful that you’re here.
1/25/23
My girl wakes me in the middle of a sleep cycle so that 7:30am feels more like 4am for the first several minutes. She smiles with wonder at me, delighted once again that I exist and that I am hers. I smile back for the same reason.
And we’re off.
Chug water (so thirsty), drink coffee, play with baby. Change diaper. Bounce baby. Go pee (baby does not like this). Make oatmeal. Bounce baby. Walk baby around the house. Change diaper. Feed baby while eating oatmeal. Watch her sleep. Use new wireless headphones to listen to lectures and feel, actually, quite productive.
Therapy client. Feed baby, get her to nap again. Listen to lectures. Eat lunch.
Go to physical therapy. Try loaded back squats for the first time since first trimester. It feels okay, but I can also tell my core isn’t as stable as it used to be. My low back wobbles a little. Decrease range of motion, work on feeling stable. Push press feels good. Squat thruster also feels good. Deadlift feels good. Stiff leg deadlift also feels good, and my PT compliments my range of motion a few times, which brings up the urge to boast about how, “well I’ve always had good hamstring mobility, you see,” but I manage to catch it just in time and simply say, “That’s good news!”
Then we do dry needling on my scar, which involves sticking tiny needles superficially into scar tissue and having me relax for 15 minutes. As I lie there, I think, “when else have I been still like this lately?” I’m not sure. I bring attention back to my breathing, rather than go down that long suffering rabbit hole, and then feel pleased with myself that I’ve done that and have to bring attention back to my breath again.
Drive home. Feed baby. Watch her nap. Therapy client. Etc. Etc. Etc.
1/26/23
In the beginning, all I felt for my parents was love. They were my universe.
Over the years, there have been moments of blame, from me to them. “Because you did this, I am this way,” and on and on.
I saw my flaws and my parents’ flaws and grieved. Separation is part of individuation, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like loss.
Over time, it has changed again. Now the phrase, “Because you did this, I am this way,” is one of gratitude, more often than not. I observe so many of the things that I like in myself because of them. I have always loved them, will always love them, and now perhaps love them more completely as I understand them anew from my own perspective of motherhood.
I know my daughter will be angry with me one day. It’s her right, and I hope she feels it and expresses it in the way she needs to, even though it will break my heart. I wonder sometimes about how exactly I will disappoint - incompetent, intrusive, absent… I want to avoid it all, but then I know that I am always going to fall short of the embrace of the benevolent universe from which she came and was.
What a comparison to have to live up to. And yet, she looks at me as though I might.
2/7/23
An interesting thing comes to my attention as I sit outside with my girl on a warm February day. She plays with a teething toy and I sit beside her. I begin to notice that I feel restless. I feel as though I’m waiting for something and I’m in a hurry for it to arrive, if only right now would just get itself over with.
But when I inquire about what that might be… I have no idea! Isn’t that insane? Isn’t that absolutely bonkers.
I think I need something and I’m frustrated that I’m not getting it but I have no idea what it is my mind was convinced that it wanted. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. Craving nothing. Rushing toward nothing.
Isn’t this the moment I waited for?
She whines, bored, so I strap her to the front of my body and walk downstairs into the yard. We wander around a while.
2/8
Five months (and a couple of days) with a baby - so much time and no time at all. So how’s it going? Within the metric of how I feel about being her mother, it’s going very well. I love being her mother.
And.
I am noticing a certain implied - occasionally explicit - pressure that gets more pervasive the older she gets. It comes from several directions, including from inside my own mind. The message is this: “Hurry up and send your baby away so that someone else can take care of her while you work more.”
My resentment toward this message is heavy and bitter.
“Shouldn’t you be back to how you were before she was born yet? What’s taking so long? How much longer do you need?”
Another month? Six? A lifetime?
I can tell that some of this pressure comes from within me because I’ve been telling people that, “she doesn’t have a daycare spot yet,” and that’s why I’m still working on a limited schedule from home. It’s still true that she doesn’t, but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that I’m not ready to put her into daycare yet, even if she did have a spot available. I’ve been externalizing the reason for my reluctance so as to avoid the blame for the inconvenience that motherhood causes to those outside that particular dyad. Perhaps I wanted to seem modern and unsentimental - something beyond mother. And yet, mother is all consuming right now. And yet, I am willing to allow it to be. To admit that it is. To want it to be.
It’s also nice to feel connected to who I was before, in these moments that are separate from her, doing the work I set out to do. But I’m not going to be exactly who I was and how I was before, and I never will be again. It would be a farce to try and create that experience.
I want to release the anger I feel toward an expectation I have no intention of meeting. It just is how it is.
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