Let me start by saying, I love my son. And by love, I mean that deep, aching part inside of me that realizes I would give my life in half of a second for this child. That love that would rather throw a ball back and forth with him or read Good Night Moon 10,582 times (in a row) or watch him accumulate handfuls of dirt and rocks in his pudgy little hands, than do just about anything else. That love that can stare at him in wonderment for hours, just marveling at his perfection. That's the kind of love I'm talking about. It's an all-encompassing, eternal, bigger-than-me feeling that I've had for this precious little boy since I first found out I was pregnant, and impossibly, continues to grow exponentially every single day.
Because my husband and I were, ahem, older when we became parents, I thought the whole parenting thing would be a breeze. By the time Reagan came along, I had traveled, enjoyed my freedom, saved up a little bit of money, experienced some unbelievable life events, and checked just about everything off of my List of Things I Want To Do Before I Have a Baby. So, I really thought adding a 7 lb. bundle of sweetness would only make everything in my life more magical, more special, more ... better (yes, I know, bad grammar).
And, for the first couple of days, it did, aside from the ridiculous amount of sleep deprivation babies make us go through. His delivery was a breeze -- as in (women who gave birth, please don't hate) an I-pushed-for-10-minutes delivery. He ate, and he slept, and repeated that cycle for days on end.
But somewhere around the end of his first week of life, my perfect ideal of how I imagined this chapter of my life to go, started to unravel a little bit. It began when I had to supplement nursing with formula because my milk production was so low. Reagan discovered that drinking from a bottle was much easier than Mommy's method, and he began to loudly, and angrily, express his preference.
And then, just as we were figuring out the balance between nursing and formula, he developed colic. (Let me just stop here and offer my sincerest and deepest apologies to all of my friends who had a colicky baby and I did not offer the appropriate amount of Advil and chocolate, because both are vital to surviving this phase of infancy).
In a matter of days, it seemed our almost-perfect child turned into a miserable, crying, whining, angry little boy. For days (Weeks? A month? The time frame is a blissful blur by now), by late afternoon/early evening, nothing made Reagan happy. No amount of driving, swinging, rocking, singing, walking, or any combination of the above, could even begin to silence this wailing, pitiful child. Nothing. We took him to the doctor (twice), we took him off dairy, we read all the books about dealing with a colicky baby, and we gritted our teeth and sometimes just cried along with him.
And then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped. But, soon after that, he became ... mobile! Who knew there came a time when you could no longer just lay them in the middle of the floor on a blanket and walk away? Who knew that they started pulling on things, and getting into things, and staying on the move all. the. time?
I should add, that while my husband goes above and beyond in doing housework and taking care of the mundane stuff of life (I wash dishes maybe once a month, for example), he was at the time working 6 days a week. And some of those days, he left at 8 in the morning, and got home after 7:30. There were moments I'd get excited to see the UPS man, just to have another adult to talk to for 4 seconds.
Here was the rub for me: For years, my time was my own. Completely. Outside of a work event (which I could accept or decline), every hour of every day was entirely structured by me for the past 10 years. And then suddenly, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, someone else was telling me what to do with my day. Cute as he was, sometimes I didn't want to stop what I was doing to rescue him from whatever perilous situation he was in. Sometimes I didn't feel like rocking him for 45 minutes so he would nap for 10. Sometimes I didn't want to feed him yet again (where do little babies put all their food, anyway?) And let's not even talk about how many diapers this little boy could fill.
True confession: 95% of the time I delighted in his sweet little angelic perfect cherub-esque face. But the other 5%, when people would say to me, "I bet you love being a Mom," I would smile and nod and kiss his ample cheeks and silently think, "Are you crazy??"
A well-meaning -- but pretty clueless -- friend, who started her family when she was still in her early 20s, would say to me, ad nauseum, "You have no idea how much your life is about to change." She didn't say it with the sense of happiness or excitement from the pure joy that babies, even colicky ones, can bring. She said it from a sad, almost resentful place of, "Enjoy your free time now, because soon you won't have any. Ever." Others made similar comments, of course, and some of them I chewed on, and some I dismissed, but mostly I just wanted to smack them on their foreheads and go, "Duh! I know it's about to change!"
And I did know all of that. But what I didn't know was how much I (gulp) didn't always want the change. I wanted Reagan. Desperately, madly, fiercely, I wanted him. I just wanted him to eat and sleep and play on my schedule. But there's a funny thing about babies -- they are pretty self-centered.
Here's what I wish someone had said to me: It's going to be hard. It's going to be really, really hard, and some days you will want to give up. But for every difficult moment, there are a thousand good ones. For every sleepless night, there are beautiful baby cuddles. For every crying fit that goes on for hours, there will be a spontaneous giggle over bath bubbles, or a puppy dog, or the way your hair touches his face. For every moment you want to run away, there will be the times when he reaches his arms up for you, and you're almost positive it's the best feeling in the world.
Now, Reagan is a 17-month-old non-stop force of energy, and he makes my world. Every morning I wake up excited to spend another day with him. I can (almost) forget those challenging early few months when I was trying to find my footing and my new identity, because these days are just really, really good. He sleeps nine to 10 hours a night, he naps without crying (most of the time), he talks (Mama, Dada, Oh mo, Oh yeah, Oh wow, ice and some odd syllable that I'm pretty sure is supposed to be "shoe"), and he makes us laugh all the time. He loves to be chased, he loves to eat, he loves to splash in his kiddie pool, and he is a ridiculously great traveler.
Yes. My life changed. In every way, my life changed. And every day, it keeps getting better and better and better.
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