(A few thoughts I had written before Wesley's birthday in July)A year ago today I had a belly the size of a basketball, swollen feet, a perfectly clean house, constant uninterrupted time with my husband, an intense aversion to the blazing hot weather and an ideal in my head of how the next year was going to go.
Today I have none of those things.
Now I have an almost one-year-old.
I knew motherhood would change me. At least I was told that. But looking back on the past year, I had no idea how much it would change me. The first day of this adventure was July 6th, 2012, the day our little guy was born. You see, I knew how the birth was going to go. I had heard dozens of birth stories from my female family members and they all went the same: water breaks before due-date, three to five hours of labor, a couple pushes and voila, baby is born. No meds. No intervention. Painful, yes, but relatively simple, right? Our son came after fifteen hours of hard labor with a posterior, asynclitic baby that was nine days overdue. The exhausting labor was followed by an emergency c-section when his heart rate dropped to 40 as he was finally crowning. When he was born, he had the cord around his neck and looped on his ankle so that every time he moved he was strangling himself.
Days after bringing our precious bundle home, I was confused by those sleep training books that make it sound all easy to let your baby CIO (cry it out), resulting in an infant that sleeps thirteen hours a night by the time it's two months old. A year ago I was telling myself just to hold on for two months after the baby came and I could return to regular sleep. Tonight I'm going to bed early so I can survive the two times my eleven-month-old will wake me up tonight.
O, and that pesky baby weight that refuses to leave even with my greatest efforts? I thought this stuff was supposed to be simple. Natural. Easy. "Just keep nursing and the baby weight will melt off," my doctor told me. I don't think a nursing five-year-old is exactly what she was thinking.
God has this kind way of tearing down the expectations I put on myself so I can move a little further into grace. I wasn't the least bit prepared to be the woman hoping for a VBAC next time I get pregnant. I didn't think I would get caught being the mom who was still sleep deprived after almost a year. And heaven forbid that I wouldn't be able to kick my body into lose-the-baby-weight mode no matter how hard I tried.
I have a confession to make: dealing with the reality of these things is so much easier than living with the expectation of my own ideals. The desire to have it all together is stifling. I wasn't expecting my own ideals to be such a rigid taskmaster that would leave me feeling like a failure so many days this past year.
In four days my bright-eyed, giggly little boy will turn one year old. I'm sure he'll wake up on his birthday with as much spunk and excitement for life as he does every day. He'll probably spend the first hour of his morning wrestling with his dad and bouncing all over me, then begging to "nore-nore" (nurse) with those completely heart-melting brown eyes looking so serious. When I get up with him on that day, I won't have time to sit and ponder my ideals of how parenting will go for the next year. I won't get to clean my house til it shines. I probably won't get a nap, an entire day alone with my husband or the luxury of putting my feet up to read that da-blame sleep training book. It's doubtful all my laundry will be done at the same time, I'll probably have dirty dishes in the sink and I may run out of diapers for the thousandth time. For heavens sake, I bet my baby will even eat some non-organic form of sugar before his birthday is up.
I can hear my own Mrs. Idealistic Pregnant Lady self a year ago gasping in disbelief.
Now? I'm way too busy enjoying every second of mothering a curious, alert, delightful little man covered in arena sand and remnants of lunch to care about that ideal stuff.
Besides, who really needs sleep anyway?!
(Yawn...)
