Last night was a different story. She was very obviously having trouble getting comfortable. It started with moaning, tossing and turning. At one point I went in and her head was pressed up against the foot of the bed, one arm flung over the back of her head and one leg sticking through the bars of her crib (and here I thought one of the bazillion crib recalls had addressed that particular hazard).
She was fine as long as I was holding her, but when this became clear it was 3:30 in the morning and I didn't fancy standing next to her crib holding her for the next three hours. So I thought to myself, Self, no one is getting any sleep this way. Let's just put her in our bed. Myself and I did so. And we discovered, quickly, that our girl is a burrower. She would wiggle around until her face was smushed right up against my own, which was fine and dandy except that my nose and mouth were buried in her chubby cheeks and I couldn't breathe. So I moved, and she went over to her daddy, who was still out cold, and burrowed into his side until he woke up and made the grave mistake of rubbing her head, which she took as a sign that it was time to play. Cue flopping and rolling and general delirium culminating in her patting (slapping) me on the face a few times, until I opened my eyes and looked at her ... and she waved "hi" at me.
Suffice it to say, bringing her in bed with us is not an option.
Today, after a trip to the doctor, we know it's a virus and an ear infection and she's started antibiotics and is Motrined up. My plan is to attempt to sleep on the couch with her if it proves to be a night like last night. I figure one of us should get some peaceful sleep, and why not let it be Steven, since I can ostensibly neglect to shower and/or dress and still get some work done tomorrow.
Which brings me to the all-around ick that was this day.
Sometimes I think on-the-job training is insufficient when it comes to parenthood. There should be a boot camp of sorts, an immersion crash course covering every scenario you might possibly encounter over the next eighteen years and then some.
I mean, parenthood. It's arguably the most important job there is, right, and there's nothing that can prepare you for all it entails. It's the great equalizer, isn't it? We grow these creatures in our bodies, we plan and prepare and stockpile gear and necessities and read All Those Books like our lives depend on it and formulate opinions on things we never before considered (cloth or disposable? breast or bottle? co-sleeping or crib? paci or not?). We decorate nurseries as though matching a bed skirt to a window treatment or finding the perfect shade of paint for those wooden wall-hanging monograms of the future occupant's future name is going to make one bit of difference.
The rules change when it becomes reality, and that happens at different times for different people. Women, more often than not, have their epiphany earlier than men, who don't suffer the back pain or the massive body changes, the blood pressure ups and downs and the sleep deprivation from fifteen nightly trips to the bathroom, who don't feel the squirms and bumps of an ACTUAL BABY growing and subsisting in their ACTUAL BODY.
Fast-forward six years, to the child who someone less sensitive than I might call our guinea pig. When we had him, my husband and I barely knew anything about being grownups, much less parents. We got dogs and thought they were a good-enough trial run. Essentially, we were stupid. Or at least its kinder equivalent, naive. Ever since, there has been something new around every corner. First diaper change, first trip to Children's Hospital ER, first public tantrum, first day of kindergarten, first day he didn't want me to sing him a song before bed ... firsts every day, every single day.
It hasn't been easy lately. In some ways my boy is old beyond his years. The child has been speaking coherently since the ripe old age of nine months, and while he has retained certain little Alexisms from yesteryear (i.e. he still says "I had bleed," instead of "I bled," for instance, and his prepositions and verb tenses aren't so polished, and some of his mispronunciations I will never correct because they are just damn cute and I'll probably continue to think so when he's sixteen and other people deem it a bit odd). But he's six. He's six and growing up too fast because that's what kids do these days. I don't think we did. But maybe members of every generation believe that they were kids longer than they were, because childhood, when you're in it, seems eternal, vast and all-encompassing with no boundaries or time constraints.
So, as a mother, I struggle to merge the duality of my son's six-year-oldness and his desire and sporadic successes at being, or at least seeming, much older than that.
"You have recess after lunch?" my mother asked him one day.
"Yes, that's correct," he replied seriously.
Who talks like that? My sometimes-pretentious first-grade man-in-the-making.
Now, and by now I mean this week, he's obsessed with sportsmanship. He is a bad sport, he says, and having seen some of his disproportionate outbursts when he loses, I can't honestly disagree with him. But we've discussed how it's a choice, not how he feels when he loses, but what he does with how he feels. (Sometimes therapy starts at home.)
But he stubbornly refuses to admit that he knows that's the case. "I made the choice to be a good sport," he told me tonight through gritted teeth, from behind the pantry door where he'd chosen to hide so as to avoid looking me in the eye. "It didn't work."
Just now I went into his room for our reading time, and I found a note on his floor.
"That's for you," he said.
"Oh really, what's it for?"
"You told me how to be a good sport, and now the good sport is just popping right out of me."
I hope, hope, hope, that we're doing right by him. But again, without the handbook, who ever knows? I wish there were report cards for parenthood. Something to let you know if your kid is on the path to greatness, or to simple happiness, or to self-fulfillment ... or to prison. Not that those are the only options, mind, but I'd take any of the first three.
And I know it's not all nurture because nature plays a role. From that I take solace and find new worries, because I am me and it's my nature.
No one instilled it in me. It's just me.
Just like Alex is Alex, sweet and stubborn and earnest, goofy and serious and fiercely loyal, tenderhearted, maddening, and temperamental.
Just like Katherine is Katherine, affectionate and obstinate, funny and exasperating, a hyperactive, intoxicated monkey as a bunkmate and a squishy piece of heaven after bathtime.
All I can say is that we're doing it, day by day, helping these little people grow and trying our blind best to facilitate that growth, to guide without pushing, and to instill in them the simplest and the most important fact that anyone can hope to possess: that they are loved without question and beyond reason.
