Motherhood - One Year In
Yesterday, I came home to discover Roxy had pooped in both bathrooms.
Will needed to drink his milk and be put to bed, the house needed to be aired out, both dogs needed to be let out and of course, the bathroom floors needed to be doused with bleach.
Oh and John was out of town so I was doing this solo.
But that’s what motherhood in a nutshell - handling shit.
Yes, it’s unconditional love, doing the voices when you read stories, having a constant snack supply and basically project managing your household but that’s just longform for, “handling shit.”
So, after yesterday’s chaos - Will decided that 5:30am was an acceptable time to wake up. Since he’s not a rooster, it’s not but that didn’t matter.
So, we hung out, played with bath toys, read La Catrina: Emociones six times and watched Law and Order: SVU together until the sun rose.
Adapt, improvise, overcome. Kid will eventually nap it out, I’ll mainline macchiatos and we’ll figure it out.
That’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the last year. That you figure it out. I mean, you cry a whole lot, shotgun a glass of Cab and stress eat like, two pounds of chips and salsa first, but after that - you get your shit together.
Shit I Have Learned:
The best sleep I get is from 12:30am-4:30am. Now that Will is sleeping through the night, I’m doing a lot better but on those rare instances that he rouses between the magical hours of half past midnight and 4:30am, I have a really hard time dragging myself out of bed in the morning.
Coffee is broken. If I drove past a Starbucks after 2:00pm, I would be up all night. Now? Espresso con panna at 3:00pm and passing out on the couch while watching Squid Game at 9:00pm.
My body will likely never be the same again. My organs literally rearranged inside of me to accommodate Will’s growing body so my body looks significantly different now than it did before.
Look how skinny I was in 2014.
Stone. Cold. Fox. John, you lucky bastard.
And this was during the “Jaime Eats ALL of the Migas Tacos in Austin” tour. (Sidebar: If you’re not eating Tacodeli’s migas tacos doused in salsa doña, are you even really living?)
Now, my stomach looks like a fucking elephant’s foot.
BUT I’m working on making peace with my body because I had a high-risk pregnancy during a global pandemic and my kid deserves a mom who isn’t a dick to herself.
That being said - anyone down to be my yoga buddy?
My hair is different now. It’s thinner, drier and frizzier. It’s constantly a hot mess. I think I need to invest in some Olaplex and go to Hollee Becker Extension School.
Weird shit makes me cry now. I was watching Law and Order: SVU yesterday and it was an episode where a white supremacist gunned down a bunch of kids at a playground. Yup. Started sobbing immediately. This week, I also cried at Will giving Indiana “gentle pets” like we taught him and that video on Reddit of that woman who rescued that puppy.
I have what I call Final Destination brain. Remember that franchise of like, 46 films where people die in horrific accidents for ninety minutes? Yeah. That lives in my head. For example - all those liquor bottles on that shelf? Yeah, that shelf is going to break and those bottles are gonna shatter and that glass is gonna fly everywhere. But that’s not what’s going to get me. What’s going to get me is slipping on that bourbon as I try to escape this chaos, smashing my head against the tile and getting massive blunt force trauma.
Anxiety!
I recognize that this is probably not the healthiest thing in the world and I’m working on having these intrusive thoughts be…less intrusive.
Necessary Over The Past Year: Google Calendar, Google Keep, snacks on snacks on snacks on snacks (Will’s been all about Happy Baby Organic Teethers), Last Podcast on the Left, $2 margaritas, flavored sparkling water, texting my best friends and sister and throwing myself around Indiana’s neck for snuggles and to remind myself that I was a mom before I was a mom and that when I don’t think I know what the hell I’m doing, I do actually know what the hell I’m doing.
Parenting takes a village and we are lucky enough to have one. Our family is super involved in Will’s life and a fair number of our friends have kids close to Will’s age. And even so, parenting is HARD. You’ve gotta let people help out - change a diaper, put them down for a nap, hold them for ten minutes so you can finish a plate of food uninterrupted. I’m not taking care of a baby, I’m trying to raise a good human being and to do that - I know I need the help of all of the good humans I know who are willing to be part of our lives.
My kid is the coolest person I know. Bar none. I know you’re supposed to love your kid and I do, but man - I like Will.
He’s wildly curious, he’s bright and he makes me laugh so hard. He’s such a bossy boots - complaining in the car if we don’t listen to the music he likes (on rotation now: Someday by The Strokes, Friend Like Me from the Aladdin soundtrack by Will Smith, Where Are U Now? by Justin Bieber and Heat of the Summer by Young The Giant) and fearless - leaping into his father’s arms in pool and dunking his little face directly into the water.All I want is to do right by him. To make sure he grows up happy and secure and knows that no matter what, I love him. And I think I’m doing a pretty OK job of that.
I look at motherhood the way I look at writing.
Being a mom and being a writer come naturally to me…and yet, they’re both really hard and I put a lot of pressure on myself.
I vacillate between two ends of the spectrum: “Look at my kid. Look at this awesome kid. Kinda crushing the Mom game here” and “Jesus Christ, I could leave this child with wolves and they would do a better job than I’m doing now.”
I try to float in the middle of these two extremes but there are those days, there are those days when everything is a bigger mess than a Real Housewives reunion special.
So, I do what I have to do - shotgun a gin cocktail/icy Topo Chico/vanilla latte, tell my husband we need Mexican food, text someone I love, kiss my perfect kid’s head and handle our shit.
