It is 10:50 p.m. and I have just fallen deeper in love.
Maggie, who has been sleeping somewhat blissfully up until this point, woke up a bit ago and demanded food. In a (most likely vain) hope that a full tummy will result in more than 1 ½ hours of uninterrupted sleep on my part I loaded her up into the high chair and began to spoon applesauce into her cherubic face.
In between smacking her lips and chewing vigorously with her gums, she began to wildly wave her hands around and discovered that she has the ability to grab the kitchen cabinet door and swing it open. Such a glorious smile of accomplishment!
Then the screeches of joy began – when Mia did this we called it her pterodactyl mating call – the squawks that she makes as she discovers that her voice can be used for more than crying. The combination of smile and screeches just made my heart melt.
I fall in love.
In the last months of my life, 26 months at this point since I became a mother, I have discovered an amazing number of complexities in a life I thought I had pretty well sorted out. How can you both love something so much you want to die and hate it with as much voracity only moments later, then climb back on the seesaw of emotion and do it again… reverse that! repeat that! – all day long, day after day?
Earlier this evening I heard a person describe a certain cheese ball as “particularly offensive to all five senses.” I loved the description but, having no cheese ball at hand to identify with, began to wonder if there has been anything in mothering that I have found “offensive to all five senses.”
A little bit of thought and I remembered a story I’ve never written about before… Izzy and I were driving home from Phoenix to Sedona with Mia when she was about 14 mos. old… She had been fussing in the back seat but I really didn’t want to stop to change what I knew was a stinky diaper. We had been on the road for almost two hours and were about 25 minutes from home so I decided that even though the aroma wafting up toward the front of the car was nasty and she was complaining I would turn a deaf ear and just book it home before stopping to change the diaper.
Bad lapse in judgment.
We were driving along and I suddenly realized that it had gotten mighty quiet in the back seat. So, I asked Izzy to take a quick look and see what was going on. He complied and reported that she was eating. No cause for concern and a plausible reason for the silence.
Until I realized that I hadn’t given her anything to eat.
Izzy realized this at the same time that I did and took another look – then veered wildly off the road to a sudden and complete stop. I began to screech, not knowing why he would do this but that it had to do with my firstborn, lovely child! He gritted out, “You don’t want to know. I promise, you don’t want to know.”
Well, that piqued my interest beyond all belief and I whipped around in the front seat to discover Mia covered in something… that turned out to be the contents of her dirty diaper. She had reached her hand up into her shorts and pulled the pooh out, wiping it all over her clothes, the car seat, her face, her hair… it was everywhere. The stink was astonishing – the whole affair was truly offensive to all five senses. (Taste being the sole province of Mia, however)
I tried to help Izzy clean her up, but three months pregnant with a sensitive stomach is not the time to try to be diplomatic and stand for equality in the messy parts of parenthood. I was retching and hopping up and down on the side of the road – Izzy finally told me to just go away and stay away after I vomited my driving snack of Nacho Cheese Doritos all over the ground. For the record, semi-digested Doritos are also a gruesome sight.
That experience is burned into my memory and Mia will live to regret doing such things. We’re just waiting until she’s 30 and we let her date for the first time. J The most humorous aspect of the story for me came after Izzy had cleaned everything up and we were back on the road for the 25 minutes to the house. I was quizzing him on how he had realized what was going on, etc. and asked what Mia had looked like when she was eating the pooh.
“Pretty satisfied, actually,” he answered.
As gross as that story is, as particularly offensive to all five senses as I find some of my memories, I have discovered that I am pretty satisfied as well.
Sewn into the craziness of those memories, embedded in the horror and terribleness of trying to survive on no continuous sleep because of the baby and the emotional mood swings of a two-year-old, is a thread of absolute knowledge that this is the single most significant contribution I will make in my life. That thread holds my sanity together, encourages me when I feel used up, and thrills me to the very depths of my soul, to the tips of my toes and through the roots of my hair.
I am truly in love.
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