6 months of Buddy Boy

You changed my life in every way from the moment we met, embarking on earth as my most important person. The love is impossible to metabolize. It’s so all encompassing, was so quick to arrive, somehow, I wasn’t expecting that. The work of taking care of you asked something from me that nothing could before.

I’ve never felt such pride in the mundane, the first time you grabbed the toy you’ve been eyeing, the first time you rolled over after months of practice, it all makes me feel like you’ve won a damn medal. I love watching you grow, learning everything about you, knowing you, noticing the little things that change from one day or week to the next. 

You’re always on my mind. You’re with me everywhere I go, I’m always thinking of your happiness and your safety. I dreamt of who you were before I met you, and when you arrived, I felt like I had known you all along. You’ve made everything more beautiful. We walk down the frozen food aisle at the grocery store and your eyes light up like you’re witnessing Machu Picchu for the first time. The earnestness of your awe has reconfigured me somehow, breathed a new type of life into me. Unexpectedly, I stopped missing my dad. By now I’m pretty certain that when you’ve suffered in life, the sweet things feel that much sweeter.  

 I’m not saying that it hasn’t been hard. Haven’t you had the experience that the best things come side by side with the hardest? I’ve never cared so much about life before; it also makes me think about death. I didn’t expect that, my own mortality suddenly on my mind. The first weeks, staying up all night with you, holding your five-pound body in my hands, feeding you, holding your head in my palm, feeling how fragile you were. I was in charge of your life. I thought about death then too, and I felt ashamed of my morbid thoughts when you were so perfect and beautiful.

 There were times when I thought my nervous system would implode. Times when I didn’t think I could survive another sleepless night, another dusk approaching, a feeling of true fear in knowing what I had to do. My days and nights became one, I constantly felt like I had just deplaned a trans-Atlantic flight. “I put deodorant on before I go to bed now,” I told my sister, laughing.

 You know that saying, if it ain’t hard why do it? Well, I know why I do easy things. Easy things are the best. I love laying on the couch, reading a book, walking Scarf in the morning, drinking wine with my husband, binge watching great TV. In these six months, I’ve longed for the easy, longed for space from you. Longed to sleep in, or sleep at all, to cook a whole meal without being interrupted, or finish my workout, all the way through, or do my work, or truly get lost in my own thoughts while I write. 

 I’ve longed for who I was before you, for the easier times, for the restful moments, for the release of the burden of loving someone so much. Of knowing that it will never go away—as my step dad always says, it’s relentlessness—knowing that this feeling is with me for life. This great love. This great worry and concern and care. Oddly, I’ve longed at times to be free of that because it’s scary and huge and overwhelming and relentless. I remind myself that I have dreams beyond you that I don’t want to forget. I work to push my body back to what it was before it carried you, telling myself it can be what it was before it had you inside of it.

 But the truth is, I am forever changed, my body too. The truth is, I’ve never felt such joy as when I see you stirring in the morning, and I go pick you up out of your crib, and you smile at me, and I know that I am your safe person. That I am your mother, that we have this connection that is so indescribably beautiful. The truth is, I spend more time than I care to admit dancing around the kitchen and making goofy noises, working for that first giggle. And when it came, nothing had ever sounded so sweet. Watching you find joy is simply the most magical thing I’ve found in this lifetime.

 After spending two days birthing you, I was bleeding and exhausted, holding you. My body had never been so taxed, so tired, so sore, so swollen. And yet, every part of me was focused on you. The first night you slept soundly, swaddled in your bassinet. The second night, you refused to be out of my arms, and I held you all night, slightly elevated in my hospital bed, while you cried, trying to make sense of your new world. You needed me so much. The biggest responsibility of my life, here it was.   

 The day after you were born, I texted my friends a picture of you, everyone shocked that you had already arrived, three weeks and one day before your due date. They asked how I was, and I replied,

“It’s the best day of my life, which is crazy bc I haven’t left my hospital bed and I’m wearing a bloody diaper and everyone has seen me naked and I’m so swollen, it’s actually kinda frightening.”

Doesn’t that kinda sum it all up?

 When we left the hospital, I cried the whole way home in the backseat with you, hormones raging, simply contemplating that you were going outside for the first time. How beautiful that was.

 One night in NYC last week, after a long, beautiful, and hard week with you, Justin and I were giving you a bottle and putting you down to sleep in your travel crib on the floor of the living room apartment. The city was buzzing with nightlife, and fancy restaurants, and music, and bars, the buzz of our life before the pandemic and before you. It was eight o clock, and we were home. After you finished your bottle, you laid on our laps, snoozing soundly, snoring just slightly, your perfect little face far away in a dream, eyes closed and fluttering. Justin and I sat there, holding hands, grinning silently, tears in our eyes, in awe of this beautiful little person, who is ours. Who I somehow made in my body and is now part of our family and the truest love of our lives. I’m your Mom. I’m the luckiest.