Hey, I know this!

The big fear with the first one is that you’ll fail. Fail at all of it: diaper changing, feeding, holding, consoling, being a mother. And you do, in a way. Diapers don’t stay clean. There is spit-up and there are days when the baby wants to eat more than the books say he should. Your muscles ache from stiff posture and frozen arms because if you move he’ll wake up. Sometimes you just can’t make him stop crying. And you can always name five or six women who seem to have it all together while you come apart.

It’s not failure but it’s not perfection and you think anything less is unacceptable. That’s how it is the first time.

By the second, and this is my sincerest hope because, well? By the second, you’ve unburdened yourself of a lot of that bull[stuff] (censored for delicate constitutions). Perfection is a myth you gave up that time you found your one-year-old toddling around the kitchen in the middle of the night sucking on a stick of butter after having broken the third refrigerator lock in a row. Or when he fell off the shopping cart you shouldn’t have let him hitch a ride on and you ran over him with it. Or when he repeated a word you didn’t know he heard you say. The myth of perfection goes the way of snuggly baby fantasies and memories of childbirth. By the second, you have reality firmly in hand.

I’m looking forward to growing this baby. I’m looking forward to feeling him/her move, to watching my belly swell, to the times when people rush to give up a seat or hold a door, and when old ladies in the grocery store stop me to offer unsolicited advice.

I’m also looking forward to holding him (stiff posture and frozen arms). To watching my big boy's face when he meets his sibling for the first time. To realizing for a second time—and much sooner than I realized it the first—that perfection is unattainable, nonexistent, and, frankly, kind of boring. That the good stuff is in the missteps. That when he shakes an entire container of baby powder all over his room and his person because I forgot to close it after the last diaper change, all I need is a vacuum and a camera.

I’ve been Mommy for a while now, and I’ve screwed up a lot. Still, I have a pretty fantastic kid despite (or because of?) those mistakes.