A child snores sweetly on my chest, his pacifier dangling precariously from his lips. He reminds me of Popeye the Sailor man in this moment. He is almost twelve pounds now, and last week I reluctantly packed away all of his newborn clothes. Tiny sleepers and onesies that, not long ago, seemed impossibly large on him went into an old Amazon box.
I have the sense that this is the beginning of one change after another for the rest of my life.
It’s both exciting and heartbreaking. I’ve entered a field of paradoxes, where opposite feelings co-mingle. Love meets grief; joy encounters overwhelm; optimism resides beside exhaustion; closeness saddles up to loneliness. I never realized you could feel this many things at once, and so acutely at that.
I’ve been wanting to write about pregnancy and the start of motherhood and the whole damn thing, but time is more precious now. Even writing this happens in fragments, dictated by naps and bottles and whether the small animal sleeping on me will tolerate being moved.
Pregnancy was beautiful and mysterious until the end. I managed to stay active until I paused my gym membership at 37 weeks. Not long after that, my blood pressure began climbing. I walked into my 39-week appointment thinking, I’ve got another week or so to prepare. Instead, my OB essentially said, We’re rolling you over to the hospital now in a wheelchair to get this baby out.
So much for preparing!
All’s well that ends well. During labor I did all the things: Pitocin, having my water broken manually, laughing gas, and finally an epidural. But my favorite intervention was the decidedly low-tech use of a mirror.
They asked me three times if I wanted one, and three times I declined. Finally, one of the nurses said, “There is something primal about being able to see what you’re working so hard for.”
That framing grabbed me.
Leo was beginning to crown, but I still needed to keep pushing. They wheeled in the floor length mirror. Eventually I could see his eyes and his nose, half a head emerging from my body, and something in me shifted. I knew: we had to get this baby out.
Giving birth is perhaps the most miraculous and commonplace experience imaginable. Billions of women have done it for millennia. And yet when it is happening to you, especially the first time, it feels impossible to grasp.
Another paradox.
What strikes me most about being a mother is the ferocity with which I want to get it right.
Challenges emerge instantly and regularly, and there is rarely a linear path to solving them. Is he crying because he’s hungry? Overtired? Gassy? Needing a cuddle? Too hot? Too cold? Is there another reason I haven’t thought of yet?
Some things simply go unsolved. Worse, some days you think you’ve cracked the code, only to discover the next morning that the code has changed. New riddles all the time.
From feeding to sleeping to bathing—his body and my own—the things that sounded simple before motherhood surprisingly aren’t. There is an enormous amount of trial and error involved in caring for a creature you love too much to feel comfortable making errors with.
Perhaps that is one of the first ways parenthood humbles you: love does not make you omniscient.
You can pay exquisite attention. You can learn the cues and read the books and ask the pediatrician and search Google at 1 am. You can become an amateur scholar of wake windows, nipple flow rates, stool colors, ounces consumed, burping techniques and the mysterious meaning of a particular cry.
And still, sometimes, the baby cries.
Right now, he still feels very “critter” to me. Little displays of personality are emerging, but there remains something wonderfully animal about him, much in the Mary Oliver sense of the “soft animal of your body.” His needs are immediate and tactile. Warmth. Milk. Sleep. Touch. Safety.
Often, when he lies on me, our bodies seem to synchronize. He becomes a sleepy bear and I feel the drowsiness arrive in my own body too, as though we are two pack animals huddled together in a pile to keep safe, warm and comforted.
There is something ancient about it. Before schedules and parenting philosophies and developmental milestones, there is simply this: one mammal settling against another.
And yet even this closeness contains its opposite. I know that the entire project is an eventual movement away from me.
First he leaves my body. Then the newborn clothes no longer fit. Soon he will hold up his own head, roll away from where I put him, crawl toward things I would prefer he not touch. Eventually there will be closed doors and secrets and places he goes without me. If all goes by design, the tiny person whose nervous system now settles against mine will spend the rest of his life needing me less. What a strange but necessary thing to hope for.
I’m amazed, too, by my spouse and his ability to ascend into his own roles. He is very much my teammate in parenthood, and I know well that such a thing is not guaranteed. I love watching him hold our boy because I can already see so much of one in the other. They favor each other physically, and I find myself wondering which parts of their personalities will overlap too. J has a gift for play and Leo already lights up with delight in response. Meanwhile, we are learning the shape of this new life together. We don’t always do it gracefully. Parenthood is riddled with trying moments, and exhaustion can make two people who love each other briefly behave in rather ornery ways.
And yet we pause, repair, recover.
We carry on for each other and for him.
Maybe that is what I am beginning to understand about getting it right. I sometimes operate under the illusion that motherhood requires me to learn the answers. Instead, it seems to require something more difficult: becoming increasingly comfortable with not having them.
I cannot make him stay little. I cannot solve every cry. I cannot prevent every frustration or know which ordinary afternoon will someday become a memory I would give anything to step inside of again.
I can only pay attention. And I am trying to.
The newborn clothes are already packed away. There will be another size after this one, and another box, and another version of him I will meet just as the previous one disappears. I suspect motherhood may be a long apprenticeship in loving what cannot be kept.
For now, though, he is still here on my chest.
Nearly twelve pounds. Warm and heavy. His breath rises and falls against me. The pacifier is barely hanging from his mouth, my little Popeye.
I could move him.
Instead, for a little while longer, I stay.
