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dane at 3:21 pm: happy
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dane at 3:22 pm: sad
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dane at 3:27 pm: asleep
two of the things i was most afraid of before dane was born was that a) i would get bored staying at home with a baby all day and b) i wouldn't like it. i think these fears stemmed from reading The Feminine Mystique in college and (more recently) from reading too many mommy blogs. there are so, so many representations of frustrated stay-at-home moms out there. and despite the fact that i personally know many happy and fulfilled moms to counterbalance that image, i never knew which side of the fence i would fall on. this might sound blasphemous to say, but you can't deny that it's a bit of a leap into the unknown! and it's impossible to predict how you will feel or how your baby will act or how wonderful/difficult it's going to be for you.
but i have had the beautiful surprise of loving everything about being a new mom. and i don't know why it should be such a surprise--i mean, i've always loved babies and loved taking care of them; of course i'm going to love taking care of my OWN baby. but every day i think, "wow, i love this." and whenever i'm rocking dane or singing and talking to him or even bouncing him to sleep while he cries, i always tell tommy, "i could do this all day long"--forgetting that, yes, that's what i do all day long. the empty gap in my life that i felt while i was still in school--the feeling that what i was doing was abstract, pointless, and not exactly useful to anyone--has gone away. i feel a billion times more useful and, yes, fulfilled, than i ever did writing a research paper on a book for a class. (to be fair, i did feel useful and fulfilled while teaching. just not while taking classes.)
now, i know that cuddling with one very easygoing newborn is not all that motherhood entails. and i know that he's only seven weeks old, and that things change very rapidly, and that i'm very, very lucky in how everything has gone so far.
but i hope that when i look back on this short time in my life i remember how happy i am right now.
3 comments:
Glad you are cherishing the time. It goes by way too fast!
I love his little face changes. That hilariously cute! When Lucas does that I go through the list in my head: diaper, food, sleep, or toy? 9 out of ten times it's sleep.
I had a similar experience--really worried that the whole SAHM thing would not be for me, and ended up loving it so much. So glad you feel this way! Dane is a lucky little man!
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