Two days from now, my baby girl is turning 6 months old. You mommas know how fast it goes. The passing of time has become outrageous. I can’t believe she’s rolling, almost crawling. Starting on some solid foods next week. Teething (bless her little heart). Responding to anything and everything around her (the pets are a real crowd-pleaser). None of this is new. We’ve all read 100 blogs about how fast kids grow and how nostalgic it all is.
But I think what’s really giving me pause for introspection is more about what’s going on inside of me. I’m finally taking a deep breath. The last 6 months have been the most terrifying, desperate, beautiful, confusing, and magical of my adult life. (NOTE TO SELF: A great way to challenge everything you ever thought you knew about life, God, and your identity is to have a kid.)
I am SUCH a first-time-mom, it’s ridiculous. You could just use “Lizzie Smiley” as the F-T-M definition in the dictionary. I have become an alien and I’m hoping to reunite with my old fabulous self at some point in the sweet bye and bye. No one freakin’ tells you that the act of having your first baby is accompanied by the terror that you will more than likely kill it.
I don’t mean maliciously— I mean that your care won’t be adequate, or your milk won’t be enough, or you’ll miss some critical sign, or you’ll expose it to deadly spores, or someone will kidnap it (not kidding, worried about this one), or heck, they’ll just die sleeping. It’s unreal to think that’s a thing.
All of these F-T-M concerns, for me, were accompanied by practically refusing to let anyone else hold, touch, change, look at, breathe near, or help with said baby. EVEN those who are more experienced. (As if I’m the first one to ever successfully birth and raise a kid LOLLLLL.) It’s all quite comical and quite exhausting.
If I thought about it long enough from my super-spiritual lens, I could come down pretty hard on myself for a laundry list of short comings: lack of faith, lack of humility, lack of self-control, lack of perspective, and for basically acting like a crazy person (pretty sure that’s on the sin list, too…). But instead, in the spirit of new births I think I’ll give myself a pass and just celebrate the beauty of it all. After all, when my baby was born— so was a mommy, and newborns get all kinds of slack. We praise them for the smallest of wins.
And so today I raise my glass to myself and to all the F-T-Ms out there. You’re doing great. And one day our hormones will normalize and we’ll be reasonable human beings again. I think.
LOVE,
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