Baby, baby

It doesn't appear to me that many (actually any) people read my blog. In case there are people who do, let me preface this post by saying that my whole blog now isn't going to be dominated by my lovely baby or my marriage or anything like that. It is not my personal taste to put every minor detail about my family on  a public forum. While I am extremely proud of the family I've made (or helped to make... It definitely takes more than just one person to make it work), I will not only talk about said family. And. Now that I've gotten that across, I would like to say a few words about how different motherhood is than I thought it would be.

I didn't ever realize that a spouse and a child would make me crazy with paranoia. Every day when my husband leaves for work, I tell him I love him, to drive safely, and then I ask him what we should do for dinner that night. Not that I particularly care about dinner that night at 6am, but mostly because I want to leave the conversation open. I don't want to say goodbye. I know that he's safe and I know that he handles things responsibly. I know that he's coming home at the end of his workday and he will be in good health. I worry about him like crazy. And I sometimes feel so blessed, I wonder when the shit is going to hit the fan. I've talked to some of my friends about this. Apparently, it's a normal feeling.

So. Every night when my husband gets home, we have this beautiful little window of time where it's just us and our new baby boy. And then around 9 or 10, when it's time for the baby to go to sleep, the same paranoia sets in. This time for baby. And all night, I'm waking up thinking, "Is he okay?!" and listening as closely as I can for his breathing... If I can't hear anything, the light comes on to check that he's still safely tucked into his bassinet.

So the paranoia is all out of love and I've succumbed to the idea that I'm never going to not be paranoid again. It's exhausting and it's a full-time job to love someone (let alone two people) this much. Definitely the best job I've ever taken on. Also words I never thought would come from my brain. You know... The "being a mommy is the greatest job ever!" Though I understand that belief now, I refuse to let being a mommy be my only identity. One, because I think I'd get bored with it pretty quickly. How does being bored with your child benefit your child? And two, because I don't think that having a mother who does nothing but dotes on you can give a person a complex. I imagine a mantra like this running through a kid's head whose mom does nothing but fawns over him, "Mommy doesn't have a life. I'm mommy's life. Let me go into the world now and assume that I'm everyone else's life, too." Not my kid...

Finally, the change in myself that I have just now started to wrap my head around... The fact that I vehemently did not want another child because I vehemently did not want to go through pregnancy again. That changed about a half second after I saw my son. I hate that I did such a quick 180. I hate that my husband said to me, "I kind of wondered if you wouldn't change your mind." I hate that I complained to everyone about pregnancy and now I realize that I'd do it over and over and over again for my son. And I wouldn't mind actually going through a pregnancy again because it's worth feeling this way. It's ten months of pure hell and one does sort of become a prisoner of their own body, but when people tell you, "Oh, when you look into your baby's eyes for the first time, you will forget how awful it was..." they're right.