The One With the Baby Pictures

(Does that title count as clickbait?)

Well, I didn't write much in May. 

I wrote a little bit. But most of the month was, rightly, taken up with the business of waiting patiently for baby #2's arrival, then waiting impatiently for his arrival, then deciding my life was a perfect graveyard of buried hopes, then finally going to the hospital for an induction 11 days past the due date, then welcoming the most precious and perfect little boy this world has ever seen (one exception, of course), and then adjusting at home to being a family of FOUR.

I am now very decidedly outnumbered by a supermajority of males, but I am very much okay with it. Just don't expect any Hashtag Boy Mom bumper stickers to be cluttering up my vehicle anytime soon.

Anyway, we all know why you clicked on this newsletter. Behold the baby pictures. 

(In general I am very cautious about sharing photos of my children on the internet, but it is a cold fact of nature that most newborns look alike, and at this tender & oblivious age I feel fairly comfortable letting you have a peep at squishy cheeks and smushed-up noses.)

I'm writing this with two thumbs, on my phone, while the child in question slumbers in the crook of my arm. My husband took our 2-year-old to the post office to give me a little bit of peace and quiet. He’s off work for the next few weeks, and I’m grateful, because I truly don’t know how I’d be surviving without him right now. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude over the last few days. I have a lot to be grateful for. My baby was born safely with much less trouble than my first (despite his late appearance). A very minor complication kept us at the hospital a little longer than we preferred, but he is healthy and thriving now. My 2-year-old is also thriving, and the fact that we now have two children who have entered this world without darkening the door of a NICU is not lost on me. My husband is staying home from work in these early days, and a substantial tax refund earlier in the year is making it possible for us to also pay our bills while he’s helping to hold down the fort. Our church family along with my biological family have generously kept us afloat with home-cooked meals when I’ve had no energy to make dinner, and our house has suffered no disaster in the last few weeks (a refrigerator on the fritz or a sewer pipe collapsing would be the LAST thing we need right now). We have still not caught COVID. The baby is sleeping as well as one could expect a newborn to sleep, eating like a champ, and giving us no concern whatsoever about the number of wet and dirty diapers he is able to produce. He has also not gotten sick at all in his first four weeks, a miracle whose import you will understand in a moment.

Why, then, when someone asks how we’re doing, is my first inclination to unfurl a laundry list of the negative moments?

Because, you see, we’ve had a sinus infection circulating the house since the beginning of May. My husband slept at home during the baby’s and my last night in the hospital because his coughing kept us all awake, and slept on the sofa the first week and a half of being at home for the same reason. As soon as he began to feel better, our toddler caught the bug and developed such nasty symptoms we worried he had pinkeye. (I’ll spare you the weepy details.) I promptly picked it up thereafter, and am still enjoying the lingering vestiges of a chest cough. I’ll spare you those details as well, but let’s just say that recovering from certain aspects of childbirth is made much more painful when you are violently coughing. The help we’d hoped to rely on from extended family got held up by unexpected work obligations and a case of COVID, plus our own reticence to expose other people to the germs in our household. The on-again-off-again system my husband had planned to implement for gradually returning to work was denied by upper-level management, and this seems a good a place as any to remark that a company that made $97 billion in profits last year still does not offer a single dime in paid parental leave. Oh, and our toddler is experiencing the normal maladjustment of an only child becoming an older sibling, and has run the gamut of tantrums, night wakings, and declaring that only Mommy can console him at any hour of any day.

But we are all together. We are making it. We will recover. We have shelter over our heads, food in the fridge, air conditioning mitigating my pollen allergies, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on what the toddler calls our “baby teevee.” We have two precious boys we get to call our own, and amid the sleeplessness and phlegm, we’ve had so many family hugs and bonding moments and tiny-voiced declarations of “good night, mine tiny baby, me wuv you.” 

It is truly an embarrassment of riches, and I think my embarrassment to admit how well we’ve been blessed is, oddly, what fuels my temptation to complain. If I don’t add the caveat that my husband’s paternity leave is unpaid and we’re only managing this because of child tax credits, what if someone resents me for having his help when many new moms can’t say the same? If I don’t explain that I’ve been sick recently, what if someone wonders why I’m not “bouncing back” from having a baby as quickly as so-and-so? The urge to mitigate any potential jealousy or judgment by offering hasty disclaimers says more, perhaps, about me than it does about the others in my life. I’m unwilling to just sit with the good things I’ve been given and instead am fretting about what others will think of me and how I’m handling those good things. Perhaps my own envy of other people, other circumstances, is coming back to bite me. Perhaps the many times I’ve muttered resentfully under my breath “must be nice,” rather than rejoicing with those who rejoice, is holding me back from unashamedly rejoicing right now. 

We live in a cynical world, a society that tends toward bitterness and grumbling. (As have humans throughout history. It’s sort of in our nature. Have you heard of the Israelites wandering for forty years in the wilderness? They were famously not very cheerful about it.) And I wonder sometimes if we’ve built up a culture of complaint as a sort of shield against criticism, hiding behind the nobility of suffering so that no one will say to us “you should be handling this better” or “you’ve got more than your share” or “you don’t deserve help, you’re clearly fine.” 

To be grateful is to be vulnerable– to open yourself up to the truth that what you have is a gift, that there are things that threaten it and ways in which it could be taken away, and yet here it is in front of you right now and the only thing you can do is give thanks. Adding caveats and disclaimers and "well, here's how things could be improved" is easy. Simply letting yourself soak up the blessing you've received is harder. 

"Today I want to take more time to appreciate," I wrote on Instagram two years ago, "and less time worrying about having not enough or too much." Comparison is the thief of joy, and complaining sure is too. 

I've been writing and rewriting this section, struggling to put these wispy ideas into words, and I'm still not fully satisfied with it. It's a different nursing session now, a different day. Enough time has passed to waft smoke and haze from the Canadian wildfires across the northeast. (Another thing to complain about– the central PA air quality. Heh.) It’s quite likely that I will come back to it in a few months with unfogged vision and better sleep and wish I'd worded things more clearly or expanded an idea more fully. But that's where I am now. Full of thankfulness and yet struggling along on not enough rest and a headache from smoke particles. A baby snoozing on my lap and a heart full of love for him and for my other two boys too, because they are a beautiful gift and my job is simply to tell God "thank you."

And not to be too braggy about the fact that this little boy is sleeping 3+ hours at a stretch each night. I know all too well that THAT gift may be taken away at any moment and be replaced with colic, so I will shut my mouth and count my blessings. 

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I did manage to write one humor piece since I last sent out a newsletter, and it was published while I was in the hospital being induced! Good times.

The Seven Stages of Grief When You Go Past Your Due Date in Frazzled 

That was it for original pieces in May (as aforementioned, other stuff took priority!) but I did repost my Pennsylvania Avenue horse story on Medium, so here’s a free link in case you’d like to read it but haven’t yet.

From the archives…

Writing Through Brain Fog in A Parent Is Born (from 2020, when my first son was a newborn)

Letting My Words Take a Beat in Age of Empathy (from 2021)

Reasons I Would Like to Give When Asked Why My One-Year-Old Isn’t Talking Yet in The Belladonna Comedy (from 2022)

See you next month! …Maybe. If I can find time to write and the wherewithal to write something worthwhile!