17 Days Old

My son was born 17 days ago.  My son is 17 days old.  Before long his age will be noted by weeks, then months, then years.  But for now, only days.

Time has a strange way of changing when you have a new baby in your life.  Days and nights blend and blur, marked only by the punctuation of a hunger cry.  Right now those cries come every 1-3 hours, the longest stretch of silence being somewhere between 3 and 7, a time that I cannot, no matter how exhausted, seem to nap.

Days feel incredibly long and yet despite this, it is rare that I am able to complete even the smallest most innocuous task.  Going through the mail.  Putting one load of laundry away.

This is not a complaint.  Merely an observation.  And one that for some reason surprises me.  I don't feel tired all the time.  Nor am I sad.  I just feel slowed down.  Like I am moving through amber love infused molasses.

I can stare at my son for hours.  Perhaps this is where so much of my time is going.

When I hold him, which I am approximately 20 hours a day, I feel complete. When he is being held by another, usually his father, I feel a baby shaped hole in the curve of my torso.

This is what being the mother of a new life is like.  It is thick and slow and full and aching and sweet and light all at the same time.

I said in an earlier post that I hoped to retain a greater sense of self with this mothering experience than I did 12 years ago, when my first son was born.  And I believe I am.  Not because of anything I am doing or not doing but simply because I have a greater sense of self.  But I also am realizing that I would never, ever want to remain unchanged by such a profoundly life changing thing.  It is a gift to be granted such change and it seems appropriate that the shift in time, my increased vulnerability and susceptibility, would result in other such openings.  A tear in the fabric that so tightly wound me into myself.

In only 17 days I have learned some hard truths about myself, as life changing events are often wont to so enlighten us.  One is that I am terrified of conflict.  Anger is a emotion that, when I experience it in others, causes me to panic.  I don't know why this is and I dance between thinking that anger is toxic and thinking that anger, like any other emotion, is temporary and okay to witness just as long as damaging behavior is not part of it.  Another thing I have realized, along these lines but not exclusive to them, is that I am generally profoundly avoidant of things that make me uncomfortable.  Going through and purging contents from the boxes that have overtaken our basement.  Disciplining my older son when he breaks rules or is terribly disrespectful.

I had an inkling of these things before.  But now they stare me in the face and I feel the palpable urge to flea into a storybook otherworld in which I do not need to address them.  Even though I know they are steps on the path towards becoming an even better me.  And nothing motivates you more to be your best you than having a new child, who is yet to know the flawed and faulted you. The you that is lazy.  The you that is scared.

I don't say this to you to or to myself for pity or mercy.  I like who I am.  I am a good person, strong and skilled in my professional field, and I know that I am as loving and attentive of a mother as they come.  But I have before me now the gift of the potential for change, the time suspended in order for me to find it, and the reason to reach for it.   In this in-between world I am sleep deprived and soft and slow.  But I am hoping I have the strength to begin a journey that parallels the others branching out from, around, and beside me as well.