Accidental Mom

 Babies warp time. There is no other explanation that my son is a one year old. I have raptly watched him go from a wriggling new arrival, to a bobble-head baby learning neck control, to a caterpillar-like creature doing “the worm” to propel, to a life-is-a-heart-attack-a-minute walking reaching getting-into-everything tiny bipedal human. Yet I look at the calendar and here we are. Somebody make me another espresso please. How am I the mother of a 1 year old?! In celebration and recognition of having birthed an amazing little human, I thought I would share what I can remember about my birthing experience. Here goes. Trigger warning: birth is primal and messy and I pull no punches. Originally I was to be induced on October 12 th . I was lost in a sea of fluid retention and was having blood pressure spikes that would wake me up at four in the morning with head-stab headaches. When I would check my own blood pressure, I would get readings in the realm o...

A few days before IT happened! (He's so worth it...) Trigger Warning – This is not a platform for religious debate. I am going to open up about my spiritual beliefs without trying to convince anybody to think differently or in return be saved from eternal damnation. Resist. The. Urge. I believe more people have died in the name of religion than all the wars combined and that there is no better way to control a people than to convince them that you are saving them from eternal damnation (cue TV evangelical voice – “For only $29.95 a month you TOO can have eternal life!”). I believe I came from something bigger than myself – something I probably can not fathom or explain. What if “God/Goddess” is the Big Bang? All light, all energy, all knowing. What if science and religion are the two halves of where we came from and divided will spawn only eternal war? What if we all just stop being assholes to each other? In the interest of staying on task, let's le...

Shorts become a hat when daddy is left in charge First of all, for you women who look amazing when you travel (like you are off to Milan for a Vogue photo shoot) and especially if you are doing it with children – good for you but fuck you. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Secondly, no matter how cute your child is, no one is EVER glad to see them get on an air plane. Especially if it is a red-eye flight and everybody planned on falling asleep and magically waking up at their destination. It was an eight hour flight to DFW with somewhere between a two to three hour layover then two more hours to Cedar Rapids Iowa, the site of Duncan's family reunion.    The Duper usually goes to bed by 7 pm, and our flight took off at 8 pm, so he was already up an hour past his bedtime. The boy is a pretty active sleeper, steamrolling all over the place and making full use of the pack and play that serves as his crib. Duper mostly wanted his mama, which meant I...

  I never realized just how gross I was until I became a mother. The other day I licked my finger for the first time to wipe a smudge of something off my child's face. Seconds later I realized the line I had crossed. Yup, I did a yucky mom thing. If I catch a whiff of something foul I will hoist my boy into the air and sniff his butt, an action that up until now I thought reserved exclusively for canine greeting. When Duper wants a snack, I scoop a handful of his cheerio-like treats and put them in front of him. On the floor. I've tried presenting them in a bowl only to have it immediately dumped. I'm just cutting out the middle step and wash one less bowl. Hey, I wash my floors every Monday and we don't wear shoes in the house. And every child has a dirt quota they need to eat. I'm just doing my part for his immune system.    And then he got his first cold just shy of ten months old. He had a temp, a head full of gluey snot, and was p...

I have breastfed my baby boy for the last time, and this realization has had me crying all day. Not sweet little corner-of-the-eye dabbing with a tissue, no. There is not enough Kleenex or Puffs in all of Costco to keep up with my current sob rate. I have just skipped right to the efficient use of a hand towel as a hankie. I'm on my second one. Why do components of motherhood come with the price of depression?  Postpartum depression.  Post weaning depression.  There is probably some cosmically enlightening reason for it, but it eludes me.  Whatever the price I'll pay it.  For now I am in the dark as to the whys of it all, and my hand towels are covered in tears and snot.   Just about three weeks ago I dutifully strapped on my breast pump to collect milk to feed the Duper while I am at work. All that really came out was sparks, smoke, and the sound of grinding gears. Out of my boobs, not the breast pump. I had a pretty similar meltdown ...

You can learn a lot from a baby, I certainly have. I thought I knew what it felt like to be protective of something or someone. Before I had my little Duper my emotionally over- wrought uncoilings of wanting to protect loved ones were nothing like what dwells glowing in my chest now. The thought of anybody hurting my son sparks a long mental list of the slow and torturous demise of many a fictional boogeyman. A friend of mine picked this out about me early on after my son was born. David has a teenage son. He basically told me to get ready to beat up a lot of kindergartners, because that is what kids do. They taunt, tease, and tussle. Horrible little five-year-old boogeymen.  Trying to lure the Duper back for a diaper with his toothbrush Babies are a lot stronger than people give them credit for. At two weeks old, I was punched in my open eye in the early morning dark as my squalling baby demanded boob. Seeing stars, I was stunned and grateful for not ha...

As I begin this post, I already know I'm going to leave something out. So much happened physically along the way there's no way to recall it all as my son is now nine months old. That and pregnancy brain turns into mom brain. Yup ladies, yours to keep. Not only am I not going to recall it all, there is no way I am going to remember order of onset so I shall just recall as much as possible working head to toe.    My actual head – starting maybe half way through my pregnancy I developed itching. From my scalp to my feet and everywhere in between. As I got closer to my due date it went from bad to dark place. It was most severe on the very top of my head and the soles of my feet. Because I also had to pee every 15 minutes, Duncan would often find me perched on the potty from his adjoining half bath contemplating whether I should actually go back to bed or just stay there because it already felt like I needed to pee again. The thing that would actually get ...