Motherhood. It’s a hard fucking business, man.
Last night I made the mistake of reading bits of a book on cognitive development. I devoured the chapter on on the psychosocial development of six-to-twelve-month olds.
Dumb idea. I don’t know why I continue to read these things. You know, the Your Baby’s First Years and Your Baby: How To Raise Him and Your Baby’s Going To Grow Up To Be Affected By That, You Know. It starts out innocently, just trying to find out if he’s “on track,” developmentally, but it always ends up with me in a sweaty, hyperventilating mess.
Last night I convinced myself that leaving Owen at daycare during this separation anxiety phase was going to harm him irrevocably and that we’d never have a secure attachment to each other. He was going to have infant depression because his mother abandoned him on a daily basis. Also, yesterday morning I got pissed off at him. Yes, indeedy, I did. And lord, did I feel guilty about it.
I suppose it had a great deal to do with the fact that I’ve been getting five hours of sleep the last week or two. And the fact that because of that, I’m always late to work. And that I really needed a fucking minute to get dressed.
Owen is in a very needy stage right now, needy in the sense that he cannot bear to be parted from me physically for the briefest of moments. And needy in such a way that when I do hold him he can’t stand whatever room I’m standing in and screams and wriggles for a change of scenery, and bites my shoulder, and slaps my face. But put him down and it’s an invitation for infant head-spinning rage.
Unfortunately, I can’t put a shirt on while I’m carrying a 20-pound writhing mass of teeth that have not quite cut the gums yet.
So I put him down, and he screamed, and I yelled at the ceiling and got dressed. And then we drove to daycare and I dropped him off with hugs and kisses, ashamed of my earlier anger toward a defenseless, teething baby who just loves his dear old mom. And he burst into tears the second I started edging toward the door. And that pretty much typifies my Monday.
And around the edges of days like this is the ongoing fear that he’s going to come to harm. I’m terrified that he’s not eating enough. Have you ever read the nutrition label on a jar of baby food? It’s like, 50 calories. I consume 50 calories just by inhaling the aroma of my lunch. And he’s refusing to take his mid-afternoon bottle, and he’s crawling all over the place, burning up all this energy. And half the time he is disgusted by whatever vegetable medley I feed him for dinner. I’m just petrified that he’s going to slowly starve and it will be all my fault. I’m also petrified that when I give him little bitey foods he’s going to choke.
Let’s see. I’m also afraid he’s going to knock his teeth out, grow up to hate me, stick his finger in an electrical socket, and eat the little bits of backyard that keep ending up on the carpet.
So at like two in the morning last night, insomnia city, I take a smoke out on the porch and read another chapter in the scary cognitive development textbook. I read and I read, and I get so consumed by this conviction that I don’t spend enough time with him that I scoop him out of his crib and lay him down on the floor in his room, on the comforter that I dragged in there, so that we could have cosleeping time while Iain snores in the next room. Cozy mother and baby time. Laying on of hands. My breath against his forehead, reassuring him that he is most definitely loved, wanted, cherished.
Right.
In reality it was another stupid decision. I can’t sleep on the floor. The baby can’t sleep with his mom constantly petting his head. The comforter isn’t big enough for us to both lie on it and be covered by the half I had folded over. I ended up wasting half an hour of precious snooze time to indulge myself in this cracked-up idea that sleeping next to him for a night was going to fix whatever I thought was wrong. And of course, I felt guilty for waking him up.
A lot of the really scary moments of motherhood so far have been inside my mind, little brain movies and played-out hypotheses. I get so worked up about what might happen, and I put so much silent pressure on myself that I just want to get out from under it, escape it, turn it off.
And that makes me feel horrible, too.
I just love him so much that anything, real or imagined, that could hurt him, including myself, terrifies me. I terrify me. It terrifies me that anything could happen to him, that I can’t protect him every second, that something that I might do or omit doing might harm him some way.
This motherhood business, man. It’s hard. It’s really fucking hard.
Dooce posted about motherhood tonight, and instead of going to bed and staring at the ceiling, thinking of things to add to my to-do list, I wanted to write what it’s like being inside my own motherhood on the bad days. So, I did. And you just read it.
The good news is that that terror doesn’t overwhelm me all the time. Sometimes, it’s quiet, lurking cooperatively on the back burner, allowing me to just chill the fuck out and have fun with Owen. Today was a good day. We made the most of dinner, smiling and laughing and blowing spit. I did the Rice Cereal dance. We listened to Kansas and The Shins. He waved his spoon in the air and got his beef and vegetable dinner on everything. We had some serious eye contact, like peas were this inside joke that only we got. It was awesome.
And I was only scared a little bit.
