Mamalove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the B

When my daughter was first starting to get mobile, I gave her a drawer in our bathroom that was filled with random junk she couldn’t hurt herself with. This drawer bought me a few minutes and allowed me to go to the bathroom or brush my teeth while she emptied it.

One day I was trying to get my hair to look not crazy before heading out to run some errands and I finished and glanced down at her. Instead of playing with her drawer of stuff, like she usually did, she was sitting on the tile, staring up at me with those wide blue eyes in that little chubba bubba face, and running a toothbrush through her hair, trying to copy how I was brushing my hair. And it was adorable and funny in retrospect but, at the moment, I didn’t laugh because the look on her face was so completely serious. It was very important to her to do this thing that Mama was doing, whatever it was, and the weight of her watching my with such open worship and idolization like that hit me hard.

This moment, to me, sums up what parenting is. It’s realizing that there is this tiny person for whom every single thing they know of the entire world comes directly from you. Not just what you teach them but every single thing you do including, and perhaps especially, what you do unconsciously. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure and I think one of the biggest reasons people struggle with their identity after having kids is that it really forces you to hold a mirror up and really look at yourself. Not that best possible version you show at work or online, the real you are when no one is looking because now someone always is.

I like myself. Maybe that’s arrogant to say but it’s true. Maybe that’s why I’m really enjoying being a mother, even the parts people told me would be awful. I’ve found that everyone, from my closest friends to family, was wrong in every single bit of advice they gave me and, while this was incredibly frustrating at times, it is as it should be. It took me a while but I made the realization everyone does eventually: that parenting advice is a joke. It’s anecdotes packaged as a cure, the tale of one thing that worked for this guy this one time that he’s selling as the One and Only Truth. And sometimes, when something is wrong and you don’t know what to do, that snake oil is comforting because it makes you feeling like you’re doing something. But in the end, we’re all dealing with individuals and what was true of someone else is only rarely going to be true for you.

When it finally sunk in that there was really no help, no advice, and that we were on our own, I was relieved. Because trusting my instincts and trusting in the person that I am to teach her by example felt much better than furrowing my brow at yet another parenting article everyone was sharing around that made me feel completely and utterly unable to relate to my fellow humans. And when a well meaning person starts to backseat parent, I have no problem telling them to back off.

I’ve found ways to do my job and work around la vida baby. I’ve gotten used to less sleep. We’ve got a system and, even if it’s not perfect, it works for us. (Side note: My husband is amazing and is doing literally everything ever and I don’t know how people who have crappy, unhelpful partners do it.) She’s brought a ton of chaos with her but we’ve come to realize that it fits neatly around the life we were already living and just makes everything a billion times more fun.

If there’s one downside it’s that, while I have limitless wells of patience for the little one, I have absolutely zero for everyone else. Part of this is the lack of sleep, I’m sure, but one of my best skills has always been playing nice with difficult people and charming the nastiest of snakes and I just can’t anymore. I hear myself matching vinegar with vinegar right back instead of the usual honey and I cringe but, in a way, it’s much more honest. As anyone who’s worked in customer service knows, pretending to be nice to mean people is exhausting and it’s sort of freeing to just have a real reaction to something instead of playing sooth-the-bear all the time. And while a part of me feels bad for the annoying people and the jerks I’m no longer coddling, the rest of me feels like maybe they shouldn’t be annoying jerks that need coddling in the first place.

It’s a work in progress, is what I’m saying. 😉

The biggest surprise has been how quickly she developed things like a sense of humor and an imagination, things I assumed would come much later. She regularly makes up stories, invents jokes (and puns, always with the puns), and does this other amazing thing where she draws something in the air with her finger and then snatches the drawing and mime-plays with the invisible object that no one taught her, she just made it up. She is always astonishing me with the things she knows and, moreover, with the things no one taught her but she just somehow absorbed through baby osmosis like who snuck into my house in the middle of the night and taught my baby how to conjugate irregular verbs?!?! To me, parenting is just having the best seats in the house to watch the magic of childhood happen. And while I teach her how to be a big kid, she teaches me the same. You don’t realize how much you miss things like coloring and playing with PlayDoh until you get to do it regularly again!

I was teaching her how to use a camera one day and she managed to snap a picture of me. I was in ill fitting pajamas, my hair greasy from not having had a chance to shower in a few days, and it was from baby level so it was mostly all chin and was possibly the least flattering picture of me ever taken. I went to delete it but I paused. Because I remembered that way she looks at me, like I’m her favorite person in the world, which I may well be as neither Minnie Mouse nor Daisy Duck are human, and I realized that was actually exactly how she sees me. That, to her, I was beautiful just like that.

I kept it. The picture on my camera and the lesson in my heart.

Sometimes I have one of those moments where I can’t believe I’m a parent at all, let alone of an amazing little two year old. My husband and I are pretty decent humans but she seems so much greater than the sum of our parts. I don’t know that I’m worthy of this many blessings but I’m doing my best to earn it every day.

So that’s the report from Year Two. Depending on who you ask, Two, Three or Four are when it all hits the proverbial fan so I thought it was worth it to take a moment and note what a crazy and absolutely wonderful time it’s been so far.

As far as my daughter is concerned, this is the face of God.