Since I had my daughter nine months ago I've been haunted by ghosts from the past. These are the spirits of previous Sugars who thought they knew everything. And I guess these Sugars knew all they needed to know at the tender ages of sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-five . . . but Sugar at thirty must put their spirits to rest. So I'm taking this opportunity to take back a few things I might have said or ideas I might have harbored when I was younger and less, um, matronly.
1. "Why can't stay-at-home moms take showers? Can't you just take one when your husband gets home? For real."
This was my first big post-delivery revelation. My first "Ohhhhhhh." Do you want to know why stay-at-home moms don't always get to shower, especially new ones? First of all, to understate, babies keep you busy. And I don't mean they make you busy, I mean they keep you busy. Everyone is told this before they have babies, and some people listen, but nobody really knows how true it is until they have one. They start you out with a fairly simple routine of eat-sleep-poop-eat-sleep-poop, and from there it evolves into more interesting cycles of repetition, constantly changing and rewarding all of your parenting accomplishments with new challenges. But for newborns most pediatricians will tell you they basically do five things: eat, sleep, pee, poop, and cry. If they stop doing one of those things, they need to see a doctor. That's sound advice and very reassuring, because they're always doing at least one of those five things. While they're doing those four things other than sleeping, you're taking care of them in a very hands-on fashion. When they finally do go to sleep, you're either trying to get some sleep yourself, eating just enough to stay alive, or trying to clean up things around the house that are on the verge of becoming dire emergencies, like dish avalanches waiting to happen. Why are these emergencies everywhere you look? Because you've been too busy! And even if you're doing stuff around the house while the baby sleeps, you'll quickly realize you should've slept, when the baby wakes up. And repeat! The cycle takes two to four hours and repeats around the clock. It's easy to forget to eat, much less shower. So what do you do when hubby comes home? You let him take care of the baby while you do all those things you never got a moment to do while he was gone. And showering only makes the top of that list every two days if you're lucky. Usually it's beat out by sleeping, eating, or washing the dishes so you have something to eat off of. This is why the luckiest new moms are the ones with vast support networks of friends and family members who will come over and clean house just to get a look at the new baby. I myself had my mom at my side for two weeks after Lucy was born. But she eventually had to go home. And when she did, I cried a little, and then I started to smell. Note: If your child was delivered by C-section, lucky you. You must shower daily until that incision is initially healed. After that, good luck.
2. "You don't have to have a child to understand what it's like to be a parent."
PAHAHAHAHA! (I might not have actually uttered these words, but I know I thought it a few times.) Yes, you do. If you've never had one, you don't understand. Period. It's not a character flaw; it's just a fact. You're not childless; you're child-free. Enjoy it. Because, well, see the next two points.
3. "Your life doesn't end when you have a baby."
Yes, it does. It's not entirely a bad thing. I think Wanda Sykes said it best when she pointed out that children ruin your life, but they give you a new one. And it's arguably a better one. It's like when your house burns down and you take the insurance money and build an even better house. Yes, that fire is shocking and traumatic and leaves you with an empty feeling of irreversible loss. And it's true you'll lose some valuable possessions and never get them back. It's painfully and undeniably hard. But then you look at that insurance check and imagine the possibilities. And then you get to work on making those possibilities reality, and you realize that fire actually lifted some weight off your shoulders. And then that initial shock wears off and you have a new house. And it will surely have its problems just like your old house did, but it's worth the effort of keeping it up. That's what kids do. They burn down your sense of personal freedom, but with it goes your arrogance. They burn down your solitude, but with it goes your loneliness. They take away so many things about you that you've worked so hard to make from yourself, and in return they give you a love like you've never known before. And one day very soon you won't be able to imagine what your life would have been like without that house you're living in now.
4. My adolescence. And everything that followed until I became a parent. Which I can't exactly "take back". But I sure wish I could, for my parents. I now know how and why people "turn into" their parents. It's not that you turn into your parents specifically. It's just that by having a child you have joined a very large club, and left another one behind for the most part. Parents see the world as basically made up of two kinds of people, parents and children. Parents have parents of their own, so they understand what it's like to be someone's child, as well as what it's like to be responsible for one. Children are people who do not have children of their own, so they do not understand what it's like to be someone's parent. This is why children do not understand their parents, or anyone else's parents for that matter. That's not to say that people without children are emotionally immature or somehow incapable in life. And it's certainly not to say that parents are the wisest and most enlightened beings on the earth. There's just a perspective children don't have and will never have until they take responsibility for a child themselves. It's not something to be taken lightly, so no one should be blamed or ridiculed for not being a parent. But once that perspective is gained, years and years of answers about one's parents are gained with it. Other questions are sure to spring up, but understanding is there. I tremble to think about the day, some thirteen odd years from now, when my daughter starts to question my love for her, but I find warmth in the hope that one day she'll have a child of her own.
5. "People who can't have children should just learn to be happy without them."
Okay, I never said it just like that. But when I was still unmarried at the ripe old age of twenty-five I began to examine the idea of never becoming a wife or a mother. What if it didn't happen for me, I was thinking. Did I want to spend my life pining for a husband and children that would never come? Or did I want to be happy with my life as it turned out? What if I fell in love with a woman and experienced the obvious reproductive conundrum? What if I never met the right partner at all and was condemned to a life of limitless personal freedom? I decided I'd look for happiness in any possibility and not build a house around an empty picture frame on a squeaky clean table, to use the example of Jenna Currier Nadeau, who wrote of her experiences with infertility. I still think that was a healthy decision for me. But what of the others around me, especially the ones building those houses? My idea was based on the most widely accepted one that children should be with both their parents, and those who couldn't should be adopted. I couldn't understand why so many infertile couples would put themselves through the rigors of fertility drugs and in vitro fertilizations when there were already children living who needed parents. I couldn't understand why gay couples would go outside their unions to get somebody pregnant so they could have a baby the "natural" way, although this was easier for me to understand given that discrimination against homosexuals is still pretty much perfectly legal in this country, which gets in the way of adoptions on that front. Actually there are a lot of things about these issues I still don't understand. I still think we as a society should turn our attention to the children who are already here, not worry ourselves sick over children who haven't been born or even conceived yet. But to anyone who really and truly wants to have a child, I have to say: do it any way you can. It is worth it. On that note . . .
6. My sanity. Children do bring with them an incredible amount of pressure, and it's easy to get lost along the way. I'm writing this so I can stop yelling at my husband in those hot-headed moments when I temporarily forget it's wrong to do so, even when he does screw up. I'm lucky to have him, and he does try, and things really are hard on him too, even if I sometimes feel I have them just a little bit harder. After a long, long week and a short, short night of interrupted sleep, I stayed in the shower this morning until the water started to go cold, and only then did I surrender and climb out, thinking I'd already experienced the high point of my day--that two or three minutes after I finished bathing and before the water lost its warmth. The bathroom has become my only refuge, and a purely theoretical one at that. To keep out my husband, my child, any house guests, and my nosy cat, a barricade is required. Sure enough as soon as I toweled off my husband burst in on me, and indeed he heard my wrath. But he was coming to tell me he was leaving with the baby for a while. Before my shower I would've seen this as an opportunity to go back to bed. Now it's an opportunity to write. So I guess that moment of silence in waning hot water wasn't the high point of my day after all. And when I see my husband's and my daughter's faces coming through the door, I'll experience another high yet.
There. I feel the spirits resting already. If I think of anything else I need to take back, I'll let you know.
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