Dear Will - Two Months Old

 

Dear Will,

What a difference a month makes, right?

Just four week ago when I wrote to you, I was staring at my computer screen through the tears of a new mother. The ones born of fear, worry, exhaustion, and the constant feeling that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Because I really didn't. You had just barreled into my life, and I found myself a little stunned by the speed at which everything changed. One second my life was one thing, and the next it was something else and I thought that maybe I was an entirely different person. I certainly didn't feel like the person I was on the day before you were born. And maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. I think it probably is. Because on the day you were born, I was born too, as a mother.

I think you spent an entire month with the top of your head wet with my tears. I'm really sorry about that. But a couple of weeks ago, something changed. I felt the undeniable shift deep within me. From fear to enjoyment. From anxiety to something resembling calm.

I think we're getting used to each other, you and I.

It started, I think, when you smiled for the first time a couple of weeks ago. You were laying on your changing table and I was talking to you and you looked at me and all of sudden your mouth curved up in a real and true smile. You are, I hope, going to smile millions of times during your life, but the first one was the most special of them all. And it unlocked something inside of me. Something that made me feel, maybe for the first time, that I'm doing this mothering thing right. That we are doing just fine.

Last week we took you to the Jersey Shore to Aunt Sara and Uncle James' beach house. On our first day there we took you to the beach in your stroller and the blue hat that I couldn't resist buying, and I dipped your feet in the ocean and in the sand. And the next morning while everyone was sleeping I took you back to the beach and we watched the sun rise over the water and it felt like we were the only two people in the world, you and me, in that moment when night became day.

And you won't remember that morning, but I will, and one day I'll tell you. I'll tell you about how you woke up at 5am and didn't want to go back to sleep after you ate. I'll tell you about how I wished that you would because I wanted to go back to sleep too. I'll tell you about how I laid you in your stroller and how we walked the one block to the beach under a sky that was just starting the lighten. I'll tell you about how I walk up the pathway leading to the beach and lifted you out of your stroller so we could watch the sun come up together. And I'll tell you about how glad I was that you didn't fall back to sleep after your bottle because I got to have that moment with you, in one of my favorite places, at the most magical time of day.

There is so much magic in the world, my sweet Will. And if I can teach you to embrace that magic, to find the things and the moments that give you joy, to return to them over and over again, I think I will have done my job right.

With love as big as the sky,

Mom

Previous Letter:

One Month

First Smiles

A couple of weeks before Will was born I read an article in The Huffington Post called The Moment I Tell New Moms to Hang On For. It was written by my blogger friend Allison Slater Tate recalling the first six weeks of her first baby's life. She writes about all the change, and about the mixture of terror, exhaustion, excitement and confusion that the first weeks with a newborn bring. But, she tells new moms, wait for it. Because sometime in those first few bleary weeks your baby will smile at you for the very first time and it will cut through all the hard and the struggle and that will be the moment where you know that you are in love with this tiny creature.

I thought about that article a lot over the first six weeks of my baby's life. While I learned how to be a mother. While I wondered what it feels like when you really love your baby and whether maybe I was feeling it already and I didn't even realize it because it was all mixed in with exhaustion, diapers, bottles, baths, bedtime routines and tears, more mine than his.

But then it happened, just like Allison said it would. We were doing our regular 9am diaper change/getting dressed routine and he was wide awake. As I snapped up his clothes I noticed that he was looking at me. Not above me or somewhere beside or behind me, but right at me. So I looked back and there it was. His first real smile.

And in that moment, my world righted itself.

I have lived lifetimes in these past seven weeks. I still feel sometimes like I barely know anything at all, but what I do know for sure is this: being a mother is tough stuff. I am a different person than I was just a few weeks ago. Equal parts stronger and more fragile. Both more patient and less. More anxious. More tired. But what I also know now is that there is joy running underneath all of this complexity that seeps up and fills my cracks just exactly when I need it. Like when my baby smiles at me on an otherwise utterly ordinary morning.

Because that's not ordinary at all. That's magic.

Dear Will - One Month Old

Will,

A few nights ago I was sitting in bed feeding you. It was very late at night, or very early in the morning, depending on how you you feel about 3am, and I was tired. I was so tired that as you ate I kept nodding off and even though we were perfectly safe in the middle of my big bed, I was terrified that if I fell asleep I would drop you and you would somehow end up on the floor. So I grabbed my phone and with my free hand I scrolled through my beloved Entertainment Weekly blogs to keep myself awake until you were done and I could put you safely back into your bassinet.

Motherhood, I'm learning, comes with a lot of unknown and a healthy dose of fear. Some of it rational and a lot of it far less so, but all of it of a kind that keeps me wide awake in the late night or early morning hours when I should be asleep, and falling asleep when I should be awake. My nights and days are flipped around now, as your are, and I can't shake the feeling that as you are learning how to do this whole life thing, I am learning it too, all over again.

I can barely summon the words to describe the past four weeks. As a writer, it is disconcerting to not be quite able to explain what has been the most transformative time period of my life, but as a human, this makes perfect sense to me.

A month ago you barreled into my life. One second you were an unknown, and the next, it was 4:17 am on a Tuesday and you were in my arms and very much real. There were some dicey moments that night, and it got scary and you had to be born really, really fast. But we did it and everything was fine and you were tiny and gorgeous and perfectly healthy, and suddenly everything was different.

I would be lying, though, if I said that this month has been all sunshine and rainbows. It hasn't. It has been hard and exhausting and overwhelming and I have spent a lot of it in tears. I think I have cried more than you have at this point, over everything and nothing at all. This is the part that no one talks about; the part that they don't show in the movies.

This is all wildly normal of course, and I sometimes can't even believe that they just let parents leave the hospital with a baby and without an instruction manual or something that tells us what to know and what to do and how to raise you up. Despite that, I think, one month in, that we are doing ok. You just went to the doctor and you have gained a lot of weight and are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, and your daddy and I have started to feel the ground firm beneath our feet. Forgive us for all of the things that we get wrong as we learn our way. We are still learning, and we are trying our very, very best.

Know this, my sweet Will. We are so happy that you are here and that we are a family. It was just your daddy and me for a long while and now, with gratitude, we are three, and it is our joy to watch as you grow. We have been waiting for you.

With love as big as the sky,

Mom

Three Weeks In

For three weeks, we've been a family of three. In a way it seems like forever, and also two minutes that this tiny creature has been in our lives. The past three weeks have been a blur of feedings, diaper changes, snatches of sleep, tears (mine more than the baby's), and complex emotions. 

The day I got home from the hospital I was a soggy mess of hormones, anxiety, and utter terror that I had no idea how to be a parent to this brand new baby. I walked into my house to a kitchen table covered in baby clothes, cases of diapers and wipes in the middle of my living room, and a baby bath tub on the counter next to the kitchen sink. As my wild and exhausted eyes took in the chaos that had replaced my formerly organized house, it occurred to me that barely anyone talks about this part of becoming a mother.

They talk about the euphoria and the happiness and the oh my god you've never felt a love like this. And maybe some new mothers feel like that. But not everyone. So it hit me hard that first day home from the hospital that no one talks about the other side of becoming a mother. The fear and the confusion, the tears for every reason and no reason at all, the feeling that a torpedo just exploded in the center of your life, and the guilt that you are not positively over the moon about this baby that you wished for for such a long time and that sometimes, in your lowest moments, you wish just a tiny bit that you could reverse course and go back to the way things were. No one talks about these things. We should.

Honestly, I'm still sort of sorting through it all.

Thankfully, for me, all of this complexity has been interspersed with moments where I am in awe of what we have created, and grateful that this baby is here and that he is mine. And as we settle in and form some semblance of a routine and figure out how to be parents, every day I feel a little more like myself. A little happier. A little more normal even if that normal isn't the same as it used to be.

Since this blog is a time capsule of sorts, I feel strongly about documenting both sides of the story, especially now, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, here is a little snapshot of our first three weeks as parents, a terribly cute baby, and our brand new life that we are slowly learning to navigate.

And Then There Were Three

 

With joy and immeasurably deep gratitude we welcome our son,

William Charles Merel ("Will").

June 30, 2015

6 lb, 3 oz.

19 1/2 inches.

And just like that, two became three.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of emotion, activity, and, more than anything else, wild and stunning change. We are all starting to settle into this new life of ours, and I am so happy to be back here to write it all. There are sundry stories in this change, and I want to tell them. 

But for now, for today, there is this. A tiny person starting to stir on his favorite perch - a blanket spread on the couch. He needs me. And I am here.

It Is So Ordered

"The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation. There is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices...The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. With that knowledge must come the recognition that laws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter."

                                    -Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, Obergefell v. Hodges

There are a great many things to say about today's historic Supreme Court decision, which ruled that same sex marriage is legal nationwide. But for now there is just this. I am proud that the child I am expecting in just two weeks will be born into a country where love is love, and where on this day, equality wins.