You have entered … Bizarro World

Wow. Owen turns six months old next Tuesday. Half a year. He was born in the depths of winter, and now he’s sweltering in the peak of summer.

It’s fucking surreal. He can sit up unassisted for hours at a time now; in fact, if he’s lying down he insists on pushing himself up on his elbows in an attempt to sit upright. He lunges after things that catch his eye. He chews on my face, which I take to mean he likes to give me big slobbery kisses.

He stays home with Iain these days while I go to work, and I’m envious of their bond now. Iain can say something complete stupid and meaningless, like “Mr. Bungo flips in the air!” and Owen will laugh his head off. He smiles when Iain even walks into the room. I have to work a lot harder, it feels like, to get that same reaction. Although I suppose that’s because a lot of my Owen time comes between 6 and 8 p.m., which are still his cranky hours.

So I’ve been feeling a little guilt and little jealousy over leaving my boys at home every day, although I’m trying hard not to. Somewhere inside me there’s a voice that says good mothers spend every waking [and sleeping!] minute with their children. I know that it’s not true; I know that in most cultures there is an extended network of caretakers, aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and siblings, and that for one person to be solely responsible for an infant is kind of crazy.

But I still feel like I ought to. When we were in Connecticut last weekend, my cousin made an offhand comment to the effect that they had never seen a mother so blasÈ about handing her child off to other people. Suddenly I felt incredibly derelict, delinquent, like I had lost whatever Bond that Owen and I shared that I could just hand him off. Never mind the fact that we were with family, people I trust with my life — I still feel, a week later, like there must be something wrong with me that I could even let my child out of my vision for more than a moment without having a paralyzing breakdown.

But that would be a ridiculous way to live. No harm comes to Owen by sitting with other members of his family. He will not be scarred because he was fed several meals by his grandparents, or his aunts and uncles. Sharing childcare duties with my child’s father does not mean I am a bad person.

But when it gets to be about 10 o’clock at night, and Owen’s been in bed for hours, I start to miss him, his soft little head, his incredibly fat legs. It’s amazing, the physical love I feel for him. There’s something in me that says HOLD THIS BABY. SNIFF HIS NECK. SNUGGLE HIM INTO YOUR ARMS and there’s not a thing I can do to stop myself from touching him. It’s intense. I joke with him every morning that I’m going to eat his toes for breakfast, but I honestly cannot stop my self from putting my mouth to his cheek, from stroking his chubby arms, holding his pudgy toes casually as I feed him.

I miss him, when he’s sleeping. I miss him right now and I just put him to bed an hour ago. I guess you could say that would be reason enough to co-sleep, but I’m also, these days, waking up refreshed and energized after eight hours of sleep. I love my baby and want to eat him for breakfast, but the knowledge that I’ll get a good night’s sleep every night [unless I stay up too late, then it’s my own damn fault] keeps me enthusiastic about life. I miss him when he’s there in his crib, but that doesn’t mean I can’t go in and stare at him for half an hour or so, holding my breath so as not to wake him up.

Powerful thing, this motherhood business. Six months into it and it’s still surreal. I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I have a baby, that Owen is my baby, that I bore him and he’s mine forever. What I haven’t quite grasped yet is that he’s going to turn into a little kid, with scraped knees and definite opinions about children’s television. And after that, I’m going to be the mother of a teenage boy, who wants to wear completely inappropriate clothing and date people I detest. And then he’s going to go to college and I’ll be up all night again. And one day he’s going to get married [maybe] and start a new family [dear God I hope so] and it’s all so incredible, unable to be credited, simply impossible that he’s not always going to be a sweet-tempered little baby.

God, I think it was just Tuesday that he was a tiny helpless blob, whose only cry was a raspy “Allah! Allah! Allah!” and who was actually taking nourishment from my breast. Or maybe that was years and years ago. Time is so funny now, with a baby. Funny and overwhelming.

I think I’m going to go wake him up now, I can’t bear it.

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