My son is two months old already. His life is already going by faster than I care to acknowledge.
When I look at him, usually when he is laying at my breast, fully satiated and half asleep, I think of all the ways I am afraid I will one day let him down. Hell, it has already started.
I wanted so desperately to exclusively breastfeed my baby. I both admire and resent the women who do this, the women whose babies have never met a baby bottle. In my realm, it is just not possible.
The first time I put a bottle to his lips, I wept. I looked into his sad eyes and felt heartache and disappointment transfer from him to me in that exchange. How could a mother give up on breastfeeding?
How could I expect my infant son to understand and process the logic of providing a bottle to satisfy his hunger if I couldn't do the same? And what if it wasn't hunger? What if his tears were the ones that meant he needed to be held and to nurse from his mother for comfort, not sustenance?
Because God knows I couldn't tell the difference at that point. What message was I sending in that case?
Don't worry, Dominic, material things can bring you comfort just like your mother's touch.
I'm not thrilled about the potential for that message being delivered. It still upsets me to provide a bottle instead of a breast. When I am home with him for the duration, I love to lay in bed, resting and nursing to our hearts' contents. But when am I home for the duration? Oh, you know, just the weekends, like every other working mother.
So, here it is, Saturday evening, and what have I accomplished but a change in clothes, a quick snack, a handful of meals for my beloved Dominic, and a Californication marathon on my phone whilst breastfeeding in bed. Not bad, not bad.
Speaking of working mothers, I cannot stay home and raise him. I worry our relationship will suffer for it. Although, I am much better off than many because my job does offer the ability to bring him to work with me should I choose and should he cooperate. I would die if I ever had to put him in day care. I just can't. It scares me. So he goes to work with me on the days his daddy can't stay home. On the days he doesn't go to work with me, I come home, hold him and forget about everything else.
Mail doesn't get opened, dinner isn't cooked, no chores are even thought of... I just want to sit and hold my baby. I want to remind him I am his momma and I want to look for all the differences in his skin, his size, and his personality from the day before. And believe me, they are there and they are plenty.
I'll never forget the first time he laughed. It was at the end of one of the days he stayed home with his daddy. I was holding him and talking to him on the couch. He let out the cutest laugh. Then he actually acknowledged it - like he knew he had never made that sound before - and did it one more time.
But so far, my biggest worry is that I will not be the best influence I can be. When I think about my life, which I so often do these days, the last five years feel different from the rest. I won't say they feel inadequate or unexciting because they are adequate and exciting in their own right, but they are most certainly not reflective of the whole of my existence.
The last five years lead me to feel as if I have lost my wanderlust, my sense of adventure and my natural curiosity. Not to mention I feel more detached from Mother Earth and less grounded than I ever have. My life has become more about checklists and kept appointments than it has moments and shared experiences.
A few months back I told my husband I wanted to fill the bed of his truck with blankets and pillows, drive it to the golf course and stare up at the stars for awhile. We ended up trading the truck for a more family-friendly sedan before ever snuggling in the bed. We still haven't looked at the stars. But yesterday I did toss a blanket in the grass of our front yard and gaze up at the sky with Dominic. And it nearly brought me to tears.
He has so much ahead of him. I hope I raise him with a natural desire to love the world, to want to explore it, and to see it for all it's wonderful, natural beauty and abundance.
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