As I sit holding my precious baby girl I’m in quite a different mindset that I was just two days ago. Today I have held my children longer, looked at their napping faces more intently, and slowed down to a pace that lets me laugh more and yell less.
At one point day before yesterday I recall the dryer was making its digital musical melody that the cycle had been interrupted, and my three year old had collapsed into a fretful fit of tears under the table because she couldn’t get her shoe on. The snotty baby shrieked with outrage that I saw it necessary to change her diaper, and the sound of SpongeBob’s maniacal laughter echoed from the living room TV. The dryer chimed persistently, I whispered, “shhh baby, it’s ok,” and the preschooler upped the volume of her wail.
At that very moment a pesky thought entered my mind, and it whispered, you messed up sister. You’re not cut out for this. You shouldn’t have had a third child. The other sane part of me snapped a lid on that mental sound bite, but not before I was saturated with guilt for even remotely regretting my latest, amazing addition to our bustling family. I loved her. But at the moment I felt overwhelmed and underachieving. I felt like I had dropped the ball long ago, and that my home was in a precarious shamble. I felt off my game and out of my league. In other words, I felt like a failure. So I was ready to throw in the towel.
Even as my mind tried to pep talk itself, you’re doing ok, hon. Them kids know you love em; another part of me, the part that felt like she was drowning, like could taste the water sloshing down her throat, that part wanted to run away. That part wanted to run back in time to a place long before children, not to stay, mind you, but just to visit for a while.
I pictured myself laying out by the pool. No little people were crawling all over me with their sweat, snot, and demands, and I enjoyed a novel uninterrupted. The mirage me even had a beer and a smoke, something I hadn’t partaken of in years, but they both seemed quite compelling in my kid-free daydream.
I snapped back to reality as we drove down the road to the baby’s appointment. Voices calling “mom, mom, hey mom. Are you listening to me?!” dragged me from my imaginary lawn chair much like they would do had it been real. I didn’t know whether to cry, laugh, or scream, so instead I answered halfheartedly, “yes baby. What?”
Some days it’s all you can do to get by. It’s all you can do to stay sane and not hurt someone. It’s all you can do to keep it in survival mode, and likely end up crawling over the finish line come bedtime. It’s not that it’s not wonderfully blessed. It is. But it’s also incredibly challenging, heck, it’s hard, and feeling like an ungrateful doofus is your reward for being human and breakable to some degree. To love something so much it hurts is the perfect picture of parenthood, and to feel so beat down and haggard while doing it is simply a glimpse from the opposite direction. The hardest thing you’ll ever love.
So I wasn’t prepared at all when this particular day ended with me in racking sobs in my parked minivan. I mean, many days end where I’m near tears from feeling like I fell short, but they seldom occur because I feel absolutely helpless to change things. Yet that’s exactly how I felt after my daughter was diagnosed with Torticollis and Scaphocephaly (short neck muscles leading to a misshapen skull).
They had talked about her possible future problems if it went on not corrected, and they discussed the possibility of her having to wear a soft helmet for 23 hours a day until she was one year old. In retrospect I realize all of this is very minor in the grand scheme of childhood, but at the time it shook me. A momma doesn’t ever want anything wrong with her children. All I kept thinking was “it’s my fault. It’s probably the way I hold her.” And it was all I could do to keep away grieving, angry, sad tears from pouring hotly down my face.
I know now from what they said and what I read that it isn’t my fault, that it’s congenital, but after an already full day of feeling like a failing mom that was the cherry on top. I looked at my precious baby girl and I couldn’t look away. She was perfect. Bulging occipital and all. Haha.
So we move forward with Physical Therapy exercises she hates, and I move forward trying to be a better mom today than I was yesterday, but also realizing that some days you just gotta take what you get. There’s also tomorrow, and as long as that comes there’s hope for something new. Parenting has all kinds of challenges, and sometimes unexpected bumps in the road, but at the end of the day, no matter how it went throughout, you can look down at precious, sleeping babies and think, I reckon I’m doing okay. Yeah, I guess I was made for this after all.