This Time Around...

When we were pregnant with Annabelle, all our friends with kids said, “Get ready. Having a baby changes everything.” At the time, I had to be careful not to roll my eyes. Of course it changes everything. Who gets pregnant thinking that everything will stay the same? But then nine months later I was the wild-eyed crazy woman clinging to my pregnant friend’s arms saying in the raspy voice of a disregarded prophet, “No, really. Having kids changes everything.” I think for a while there I really thought I might die from lack of sleep. Like one of those contestants on a radio program who stays awake for four days straight and wins a million dollars only to spend the rest of his brain-dead life in a nursing home. Yeah, I thought I was going to be that guy for a while.

So when those same friends said, “Your second baby is so much easier than the first,” I was both skeptical and hopeful. Experience told me I was in for a sleepless marathon. But their counsel had proved reliable in the past. I stepped into motherhood the second time around with trepidatious hope.   

And, granted, I am only two weeks in. But it has been two weeks of living in one-room as a family of four, changing two sets of diapers, and recovering from a touch-and-go week in the hospital with a preemie. And you know what? I still think this is easier than the first time around.

I have only cried irrationally once (by my count anyway; Bryan might define “irrationally” differently) and if you find civil war particularly heart-wrenching then maybe you would have cried at the opening scene of “The Hatfields and McCoys” miniseries too. The point is, overall, I have just been really, really happy.

Expectations have a lot to do with it. There is nothing like that first experience of being jerked by your hair right out of contented selfishness. By now I am already used to privacy in the bathroom being a rare treat and sleep being something that only comes one someone else’s terms. Confidence is another. I remember half of my sleeplessness a year and a half ago had less to do with Annabelle and more to do with me staying up panicking over my mothering skills. Am I letting her cry too much? Too little? Is she getting enough to eat? Is she too fat? Is she already destined to a lifetime of counseling because I wondering if she is too fat at two months old? But now I hardly wake up for nighttime feedings at all. I feed her when she is hungry and let her sleep with me when she wants to. And I don’t stress about it. I’m a mama, her mama. And right now, that’s enough.

But maybe more than anything, the peace I am experiencing this time around has to do with living just a little bit longer. When Annabelle was born I actually spent time thinking about things like whether she had enough cute outfits with matching bows for her first couple months of church, or how much I regretted not having access to a photographer who would take black and white portraits of her asleep naked in a basket sitting in a field of flowers. But this time around those things have scarcely crossed my mind. She hardly fits into any of her sister’s hand-me-down newborn onesies much less anything else and I couldn’t care less. Why? Because this time around I have friends with months and years of disappointments and maybe even a handful of miscarriages behind them, and still no big round belly to show off. Because this time around I have friends with babies due mere days before their husbands are deployed for months overseas. Because this time around I spent time in the nursery with women who had been coming though those swinging doors every day for two months to pump milk for the two pounds of life they still couldn’t even cradle in their arms. Because this time around I have seen the bush hospital where, with just a few days difference, Mary Katherine could so easily have been born and maybe forever changed in a heart-wrenching way, our experience of Christmas day.

But she didn’t. She forever changed it in a beautiful way. (On a side note, several Americans who have heard about MK’s birth story have said things along the lines of, “Oh, poor thing! She was born on Christmas? Now she will get jipped on presents for the rest of her life!” But I love the way Africans have responded. Almost without exception their answer has been, “She was born on Christmas Day? Wow, how lucky! She must be so special.” As though in some mysterious way that none of us can quite put our finger on, her birthday means something. I love it.)

This time around I feel just a little more grounded, a little more open-eyed, a little more aware of just how priceless the treasures in my arms really are. So even in those crazy-mama moments of wondering how in the heck I am going to do this (I still have them), I feel an overwhelming sense of peace and thankfulness. In this crazy world of imperfect beauty, I know just a little more fully how blessed I am.

Now if I can just keep in my mind my friends’ third piece of advice. I think their exact words were, “I don’t care if your comfort drink of choice is chamomile tea or gin and tonic, but you better have plenty of it on hand for that first year of having two under two.”

 Oh boy…