I’ve been a mom for 10 months now. What’s it like being a mother?
You dream. You
wonder. You visualize what that first
quiet moment with your child is going to be like. In one word?
Love. You know in ‘How the Grinch
Stole Christmas’ the Grinch’s heart grows?
It’s exactly like that. In one
breath your capacity to love has tripled.
This is one of my favorite pictures when I was in the hospital. It was just me and Teddy and he was really
snuggled up. I couldn’t see him so I was
using my phone to just stare at him.
Love at first sight is real.
I was amazingly blessed to get to stay at home for eight and
a half months. It wasn’t easy by any
stretch of the imagination, but it was worth it. For the first three months they are pretty
much a ball of goo and don’t do much. I
spent hours and hours and hours just staring at Teddy. I’d prop him up on my knees and just stare at
him. I never got tired of it. If someone told me that before I had a child
I would make fun of them. Now I totally
get it.
Speaking of staring at them while they are awake, just wait
until they are sleeping. Especially when
they start crossing their legs and picking their favorite position to
sleep. It will melt your heart that’s
three sizes bigger now. Seriously.
Then, one day magically they wake up and have moved from the
newborn phase to the baby phase. The
baby phase is super fun. They giggle, they
sit up, they are learning so fast. In my
staring at Teddy at all the time I would look for changes each day and find
them. Being a mother makes you deal with
change in a way that you never considered before.
You start dreaming about what you want for your kid. I absolutely want him to grow up playing in the
woods like I did. I want him to know his
way around the land. I want him to grow
up going hunting with his dad, Papa, Uncle Richy, Nolan, and Mason. I want family to be important to him.
Then, one day you’ll walk in after his nap and your heart
will drop to your feet. He’s figured out
how to sit up and it’s time to lower the mattress. On one hand, you are super proud of him and
how happy he is with himself. On the other
hand, he’s growing up so fast and in a blink of eye he won’t be a baby anymore.
Adventures mean so much more to you after you have a
kid. There’s the excitement that you
have for yourself, but more than that there’s the excitement of seeing things
through your child’s eyes. You catch a
glimpse of the future. His first time at
the ranch, his first time seeing wind mills, his first time to go exploring on
the land with his daddy. Once again,
your heart just melts.
You learn to find joy in the saddest of places. When inevitabley the great plans you have for
the weekend go up in smoke (or in a stomach bug as the case may be), you put
your guns up and just enjoy the Tech win and the cute jersey.
It teaches you find the one piece of good news in your day and hold on
to it with both hands, because some days are just plain hard. Harder than you ever imagined, but in the end
you pull yourself up by the bootstraps because you have to, you are a parent
now.
Then, there’s the day that you go back to work (or leave
them for a significant portion of the day).
Your heart will literally break in two.
No one will ever know how to take care of your child as well as you
can. No one. Not his father, not his grandparents, not the
nanny, or the daycare, but that’s okay. You will
adjust. You will get frustrated when
things aren’t done your way, but in the end the kid will be fine, and you will
have new perspective. Being a parent is
so hard.
You will cry more than you ever though imaginable, but you
will also laugh. You will have a good
laugh that goes down all the way to your soul.
So, is it worth yet? Yes. Am I ready to be pregnant again? Sweet Lord, no. No.
No. No.