1. My baby was very, very bald and had very, very big eyes. Like a Glo Worm.
2. I was very, very unprepared for motherhood.
3. Our old house was quite probably situated over a Hellmouth. (Maybe I should’ve warned the nice man who bought it from us after approximately seventy-five years on the market.)
We moved when I was 37 weeks pregnant. I picked up one end of a couch and my share of fairly heavy boxes in the process. We agreed not to tell our mothers that. The dogs settled in quickly, and Steven acclimated ... I never did. Before I could come to know the Stonehaven house as home, I had a baby, and my world turned inside out. We called him Alexander the Demander. I don’t think he was as fussy as we’ve come to remember. I think we were scared new (young) parents and everything was amplified and magnified until we found ourselves hopelessly confused about where we belonged on the spectrum of This Is Normal.
And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if he cried incessantly or a perfectly normal amount. We figured out that a few seconds outside would snap him out of those cries that didn’t seem tied to anything we could fix. We figured out that rocking him in the glider in his room with the lights off was akin to magic, and that he liked Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” a song to which I inexplicably know all the words. I learned to relinquish some measure of control because God knows you don’t have much when it comes to babies. Eventually, eventually, I didn’t overdo when he whimpered and I learned that getting a grip on ME was a prerequisite to soothing him.
Easily frustrated is my sweet boychild. Type A, like his grandfather and his mommy. Baby steps were never enough to satisfy him. Tummy time made him want to crawl, crawling made him want to walk, walking made him want to run. He’s doing 100-piece jigsaw puzzles on the computer now and grouching that it takes him too long. I wish he knew there’s time to reach all these goals. That one day he’ll be 31, expecting his second child, realizing that kids he used to babysit are graduating from college and entering the real world, and all the milestones will come in their own time. I hope he can come to see and appreciate himself for what he is and what he can do—both of which blow my mind on a daily basis.
“I hope we get an easy one this time,” said Steven, making me envision a warehouse of babies, row after row of bassinets, each tagged with a temperament and a number denoting level of difficulty. I agreed with him, remembering the infinite afternoons spent coddling and swaying, singing and patting and rocking and shushing. But then Alex ran into the room to give me a “golden ticket,” which, he explained, I could use to purchase prizes from his room, anything I wanted except for his cars because those are special and cost three golden tickets, and I changed my mind: I want our baby. I want Alex’s brother or sister, Steven’s son or daughter, my little bug. I want another big-eyed bald Glo Worm with Kermit the Frog legs, or a chunky teddy bear with untamable locks. Whoever we get will be just right for us.
Five days and counting till the Big Ultrasound!
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