a decade ago
10 years ago I went down to the university bookstore and bought the Norton Anthology of American Literature. I also bought grammar books and paper and pencils and even at 20 with what, at least at that time, seemed like a fair share of experience, I felt like five and starting school all over again. People were new, smells were new and in the evening when I was once again back at my parents’ place, I would talk through dinner and forget to eat because of all the new things I had experienced. At night I slept like a log.
Treading the halls of the university all those years ago felt like my first grown-up move. After finishing my A-levels I had two gap years. I worked, took a journalism course and spent four months in Paris improving my French, and for some reason none of this felt as grown-up as buying those first books, preparing for my first semester at university and trying to figure out which people to befriend and which to leave alone.
I don’t know how to describe my first year at university. I was immature and was used to being taken care of in a way that university doesn’t provide. Luckily I had good people around me who saved me and made sure I wasn’t kicked off the train. I had my ticket, I promise, but had I been asked to show it, I would have been one of those people going through every possible pocket saying “I know it’s here somewhere”, causing all other passengers to think that there was never a ticket, only an attempt of a free ride.
I fell in love at university. With literature, with the ski instructor (the one everyone fell for, the one who knew he’d do great at university – one way or the other). I made new friends and lost some of them again. I rode a green bicycle, way too small, to and from the parties at university, and I listened to my mother’s concerns about her youngest child getting on that bike.
Come Christmas 10 years ago, I sat down and memorized the American presidents as part of the preparation for our American and British history exam. I passed. Easily. But I still remember those nerves on the morning of our first exam. The hour long train ride I took from my parents’ house to where the exam was, and how I worried that I would fail and be left behind if I screwed up and forgot that Roosevelt was before Hoover who then again was before Roosevelt. I never questioned why it was only their names that were important and not their party.
By the end of the first year, I had matured considerably. I had long learned that even though friends look after you, you need to look after yourself. The Norton Anthology of English Literature had joined the American. And the ski instructor dated some girl, cheating on her at every chance he got. I had moved out of my parents’ place and had my own tiny studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom and a phone I could choose not to pick up if I didn’t want to.
Today, I have a job, a husband, a baby girl. G and I look out the window and see all those young people, dressed to the nines, who are heading to university, who will spent the next couple of days buying books and falling in love and thinking that this is as grown-up as it gets. And I smile and kiss my baby girl on the cheek and thank my lucky stars that I went, but also that it’s over.
sleep
Dear Mum,
Remember a couple of weeks ago when I surprised you and dad by waking up at 6:30am after having gone to bed at 9:30pm? Do you remember? Do you remember how good you felt in the morning and how you spent the next many days wondering if I would do it again (which I didn’t – instead I started waking up at 3 instead of 4 for my night snack)?
The thing is: I don’t think you remember, because if you remembered you would have slept last night when I slept. I gave you the chance of sleeping more than seven hours without being woken up, but you decided to stay awake between 3 and 4:30. You may think: I hope she sleeps through the night again tonight, but I am not so sure. I am only eleven weeks old, and who knows when I will sleep through the night again? Let last night be a lesson: Sleep when you can (I do).
Much love
BOM
***
Dearest BOM,
Your mother is SO stupid. Being awake when you are sleeping through the night is about the stupidest thing one can do. I completely understand why you spent half an hour this morning telling me off (but how I love your babbling). And I am well aware that you might punish me later today when all I dream off is a nap by not wanting to sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time. I completely understand. One must be punished for one’s stupidities, I am no exception.
And the really awful thing is that I have waited for this night ever since you did it last time (at which point I had waited for it since your birth) a couple of weeks back. Not only because it is so lovely with seven straight hours of sleep, but because sleeping through is something that your friends don’t do yet so it makes you kind of special and gives me a chance to brag about you. “She sleept through the night this week,” I would say and smile and all the other mothers would turn and look at you and in their eyes were written “If only I could have a baby like her for a night, just one night, I am not asking for more”.
I am aware of my responsibilities. Never fear that. When you want milk tonight, I will give you milk, but you can’t take my hopes and dreams of another night with you sleeping through in the near future from me. I am after all only human.
I love you – sleeping through the night or not
Mum
***
Dear Mum,
I will see what I can do. Milk tastes awfully good though so I am thinking I will go back to the night snack for a little while. Alright with you?
Anyway, you seem to have learned your lesson. When I sleep, you sleep. So what are you doing now btw?
Much love
BOM
the first year
Dear J,
One year and two days. Sunday was our one year anniversary. The weather was beautiful, just the kind you hope for on your wedding day – all sun, no rain.
So much has happened this past year and yet it all comes down to one thing: G. This year the 23rd of August wasn’t about us. It was about her. As my mother texted me in the morning: “Congratulations on your wedding day. It has indeed been a great first year for you”. It has, it really has. Our baby girl is two and a half months old and she is thriving. The past year has been all about her. She was with us at the wedding and on our honeymoon even though she wasn’t conceived yet. Even from before we found out she was on her way, it has been all about her. I don’t mind. I don’t think you mind. I don’t know what other people do during their first year of marriage, but you and I skipped the extensive travelling, buying a new home, working like mad to pay the wedding debt off that others may do (?). Instead we watched my stomach grow, listened to a tiny heart beat and in the end welcomed the most beautiful and perfect baby girl we could ever have imagined.
This past weekend you and I had been together for seven years. Seven years ago at the beach, me in a blue and white striped dress, we began our life together. If you had asked me back then what my life would look like seven years later, I don’t know what I would have answered. It doesn’t really matter either. In many ways the life we live is nothing like I thought it would be. Some things take longer than you imagine, some things don’t come at your whistle, but we have had seven great years together.
On Sunday evening we ate the last of our wedding cake. G was in bed and sound asleep and we sat at the dining table with cake and espresso. I think we were both a little tired.
We went to bed just after 10pm. The warmth from your body was familiar and safe. That is the way it is. The warmth from your body feels the same even though so much has changed. You are still you and I am still me, we are still husband and wife, but we have become parents. Father and mother – I like the sound of it. A lot.
Much, much love (yesterday, today, tomorrow, forever!)
Your wife, your daughter’s mother
here’s my friday for you
Since the news papers didn’t land on the doormat until 9am (two and a half hours after they were supposed to be there), I spent my Friday morning reading about mastitis in every single one of our books that would mention it. That’s not the way I usually dream of starting my weekend.
My left breast had been sore for a couple of days. Nothing I couldn’t handle, nothing I thought much of. I did have to “hand milk” (wow, this doesn’t make me feel like a cow at all) it Wednesday at 3am, but Thursday night was fine and I forgot about it. Until last night, that is, when my breast was relatively sore and the lumps in my breast made me conclude quite quickly that I had blocked milk ducts.
So this Friday G and I have spent trying different feeding positions and buying and sterilising this wonder. The good thing is the lumps have gone; the weird thing is that this has actually become part of everyday life.
all about the baby
These days it is all about the baby. She is with me everywhere. These past two months I have been out without her a handful of times and it’s not that I have been seeing girlfriends or buying myself fancy new clothes. No. It has been a handful of not more than half an hour outings to the grocery store, the chemist or the flower shop (where I treated myself to a cactus even though I now have a kid and cactuses are not the ideal plant when you have kids around, but I figured that until she’s walking it would be okay). And for now, I am happy with those tiny outings. Despite my occasional annoyance with us always being together (when she won’t fall asleep in the pram and cries while we are in the checkout line), I am not yet ready to leave her in the hands of strangers (or relatives) in order to get more alone time.
I haven’t forgotten that there were once days with no baby, days that were completely mine with no one interfering. And I haven’t forgotten what it was like to be just me and J. I miss those things, I miss hour long dinners with J and a bottle of champagne. And on days like yesterday where my body felt as if I had been up since 3am, I miss sleeping in. I see couples in love on their way to the beach and miss the sun kissing my skin and splashing water on J, I read film and theatre reviews and miss the hours spent in the dark, I buy eggs and flour for a cake I don’t have time to bake and miss the days when baking was always an option.
But what I don’t miss is the misery because I wasn’t pregnant, the crying, the fake smile I had to put on when people came over and told us they were expecting. I don’t miss the discussions and arguments J and I had late at night when I thought life had decided against us. Nor do I miss the jealousy I felt when pregnant women walked passed me on the street – smiling and beaming. I don’t miss googling like a mad woman, never my name, always things in the line of fertility. These days I am happy where I am. Sometimes it’s tough, but mostly it is just the greatest thing ever. It was in every way worth the wait, not that I still wouldn’t have loved if it had come easier.
That everything is about the baby doesn’t really bother me, not yet at least. It does make it a bit more difficult to email people who I know won’t be interested in hearing about labour and the first weeks of motherhood and how maternity leave is going way too fast, but my life is all about G so I would pretend to be something else if I didn’t write about her.
The other day I sat in front of the computer trying to figure out if I could write a post that wasn’t about my daughter. It would be okay to mention her, but I had to focus on something else. I couldn’t come up with anything. And then I thought to myself that I am actually alright with things being like that. After all, this blog was from the very beginning a thinly disguised place for me to write about trying to get pregnant, wanting to get pregnant. My great 2008 was not about anything else and even though having a baby was number 5 on my list, I could easily have made it number one, I could have made it the only thing on my list. So for now, I am fine with my daughter taking up every second of the day.
Happy weekend everyone. Where I am, the sun is shining, the music is playing, the baby is sleeping and the family of three has a lovely weekend ahead of them.
not alone
The first month after giving birth, I was quite sure G would be an only child. The day she turned one month old, I sat breastfeeding her with tears running down my cheeks because things were just too hard. The next day I probably smiled. I don’t remember. Right now, I am ready for more children, but tomorrow? Who knows?
I searched for soul mates and found one in a friend of mine who was honest and straightforward. I searched for more but didn’t – couldn’t – find them. It seemed my friends had had the easiest of babies. One was good enough to tell me that things had probably been tough in the beginning but she had since forgotten. It warmed me a little but everything soon turned cold around me again.
I will continue to write this sentence: I never believed motherhood would be easy. I never did. I promise. But in so many ways it has surprised me.
I am all alone. I am the only one with a child that sleeps too little, needs help to be breastfed, cries at night for no reason. I tell myself this over and over again. One evening I tell J that I think it is fair to say we haven’t got the easiest baby. He looks at me and asks what good saying that will do us? We fight because I need to say it and he needs me to not say that kind of thing. The next day she is an angel.
I am scared shitless about attending the wedding of a couple of our really good friends. Scared because she juggled a three month old perfectly at our wedding last year and scared because our only other venture out into the real world has been a birthday party which we left early due to incosolable baby girl (ours). But G behaves her best. She won’t sleep while we toast the couple, find our seats and eat the starter, but as soon as the buffet is on the table, she’s out. Six hours. I dance with my husband, the bride, the groom. I don’t drink a sip of alcohol, but I feel as if I am at a party and I am having fun. Sunday is a fight, but who cares when Saturday was bubbly like a glass of champagne?
Every Monday I sit with five other mothers I didn’t know five weeks ago. Mother group they call it. At first, the only thing we had in common was having had children around the same time. Our children’s birthdays, the fact that it is our first babies and the part of town we have chosen to live in is what has brought us together. We were asked if we wanted to join, and we all said yes whispering to ourselves that it would be okay to quit should the others turn out to be people we didn’t get along with. So far we are still together. Getting along. We talk and share our experiences. Five weeks after our first meeting I dare to ask if any of them have felt as I have: This is too hard, this will be the only one I ever have. They all have. And just like that, question by question, we learn that we have things in common. We might never meet up for lunch without our kids. We might not see each other again once maternity leave is over and our kids are in day care, but right now we have something in common, something which brings us together.
I started school when I was six and I left university when I was 26. I feel as if I have learned more, seen more, these past two months than I did during those 20 years. Every day feels like driving around a country whose infra structure has not yet been thought through. It is a bumpy road. It is up and down and driving way too fast for my liking and turning corners when you would much rather just go ahead. But the view, the view is so great. And the people I get to ride with in the car, those people are so great. We fight, we cry, but we have so much together – laughs, smiles, naps, kisses, love – and all of that makes it all worth it. All worth it – even if tomorrow is bumpier than anything we have seen yet.
vacation
The last vacation I went on was our honeymoon. J and I drove around Auvergne, France and enjoyed the newlywed bliss while hoping and praying pregnancy would come to us in the near future. I can’t remember us talking about it, but for some months it had been an extra passenger in our relationship – always there, but not necessarily speaking up.
This year vacation is very different. J has three weeks, which began last Friday, and the extra passenger is now the baby we dreamed off and hoped for. This morning J asked if it was Thursday alreday and I said yes, and he wondered where the last couple of days had gone, vacation week number one halfway gone already.
A lot of the five past days has been spent on our backs with BOM on our chests. Her stomach ache reached unknown heights Tuesday night with crying fits that made me google baby colic, we tried and tried to get her to calm down. We both felt desperate and rejected, but we got through the night and yesterday and when the fits (this time not as bad but still) began, we placed ourselves in front of the TV and BOM on J’s chest and watched two episodes of Mad Men. It won’t work again, I know, because these things only work once, but it gave us an evening that was more like the once we used to have before she came, and we needed that.
Next week is “going away week”. We are taking BOM to the other end of the country and visiting both sets of grandparents. The past couple of days have made me worry about the trip, but J is right when he tells me we have to go, we have to get out of the house, have to take her places and see how it goes. And if it doesn’t we’ll figure out what to do then.
I am lucky to have him by my side. He makes sure I get out of the house, that I see, explore, stay sane.
Spot the cow(s). Honeymoon in Auvergne, France
