I’ve been sitting here alternating between staring at a blank page and playing Angry Birds on Facebook (amusing, horrible, stupid game that it is), and trying to think of something, ANYTHING (please God send me an idea) to write a post about. The trouble is, I keep on looking at my life as from an outsider’s perspective, and nearly falling asleep out of boredom.
And I keep telling myself, Wow, I don’t DO anything.
And that’s just…a lie. Really.
I wake up in the morning around seven, sometimes because I’m just used to it by now, but usually because there’s a tiny little munchkin in the next room who is jumping in his crib and wants some breakfast. And so, sympathetic as I am to hungry baby tummies, I shuffle and stumble around in a zombie-like fashion and get my child some breakfast. If I’m lucky, my eyes are even open. If I’m not lucky, I try to start the coffee a-percolating without adding any water.
Don’t. Do. That.
E and I spend a few minutes having a mostly one-sided conversation as I make valiant attempts to wake up and feel like a human being. I mumble strange things at him as he drinks his milk from his sippy-cup or throws his cereal on the floor, and occasionally he graces me with a response like, “Pthhbbbbbt” or “ah-nanana-dat”.
Babies are so mysterious.
After a lot of coffee on my part, and a cup of milk, a cup of juice, and most of a Baby Einstein video on the baby’s part, E and I can tolerate each other better. Meaning, I don’t resent him for waking up before noon once I’m WIDE awake, and he doesn’t resent me for being so slow about getting his breakfast once he’s got a full tummy.
We have a system, and it works for us.
We play. We irritate each other. He wants to terrorize whichever cat is stupid enough to lay down on the floor near him, and I tell him no. He insists. I insist. The cat realizes it is about to lose a chunk of fur or an ear or a tail and skedaddles. E screams, and I sometimes feel like joining in.
And then I scoop him up off the floor and he lays his head on my shoulder and I sing a silly song and he sometimes tries to sing, too. All is right with the world, and it’s only 8:30 and the day suddenly seems very long.
On a good, productive sort of day, I clean the house while E crawls around and pulls Tupperware off a low shelf to use as drums and then I clean some more while he’s having a short morning nap.
On a bad, lazy day, I beat up the Tupperware, too, and then I spend too much time either on the phone or playing Angry Birds or watching HGTV, or all three.
I think the day must seem to be starting all over again for E after his nap. It’s almost identical to morning; food and drink, Baby Einstein for a few minutes, yelling at me to hurry it up and feed/change/play with him. He’s just a little guy- time means nothing to him (as I have learned and re-learned with each of the Daylight Savings Time changes E has lived through).
In the afternoons, I try to make sure I teach E something. Anything. A new game, a new word, whatever.
I usually feel like he’s paying no attention to me whatsoever, unless he’s trying to tear my glasses off my face. Other days, I give up and say something like, “Okay then, go find Elmo and stop abusing Mommy”, and guess what? He knows his Elmo doll. He actually turns around on his little diapered bottom and crawls over to where Elmo is at on the floor amongst the other toys.
He knows what a monkey is, and the toy monkeys he has, he will find and pick up on command. “Can you get a monkey, squirrelly-boo?”
Yes, yes he can.
Spoons, shoes, Elmo, monkeys, cups, he knows the difference. Pillows, not so much. “Find a pillow, buddy!”
No dice.
An afternoon nap should mean more cleaning, or at least something productive on my end. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And again the day starts brand-new (at least I think it does) for the baby (who is not so much baby as toddler these days, but I don’t want to accept that just yet).
We have a game that we play on the couch, where I sit at one end with one leg up on the edge, holding E in a standing position, facing me. Every time I get set up this way with him, he gets a huge smile on his face and starts shaking both of his hands (sort of like waving) at me. This means, “Shake me up and let me fall backwards on the pillow!”
…not that he knows the words for that.
So, I shake him up (gently!) and let go and he plops onto the pillow behind him and he giggles in that way that only babies can, and we repeat the process.
For like, EVER.
At least, until he sits up and tries to throw himself off the sofa, face first, and I catch him and set him on the floor. Much like a wind-up toy, he takes off.
We practice the words he already knows, and I try SO hard to teach him new ones. One of these days, he’ll just start saying something out of the blue, and it probably won’t even be one of the words I’m trying to teach him.
I would not be at all shocked to hear him suddenly say, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.
Alright, I would.
Sometimes I manage to cook dinner for Clint and myself before E’s bedtime, so that we can eat as a family. Usually, the only way I can concentrate on cooking is if I feed and put E to bed first. He waves “bye-bye, night-night” at his daddy, and he clings to me under the pretense of a sweet little baby hug, and most of the time (given his gums aren’t killing him), he goes right to sleep. Occasionally, he protests for quite a while before giving in. Some nights, I hear a lot of movement from his room and I lie in bed with my eyes shut tight and the blanket over my head thinking, “please don’t wake up please don’t wake up please don’t wake up”.
Babies, as every parent knows, will do exactly as they please.
I am exhausted by 10:30 every night. Sometimes, judging by the state of the house, Clint wonders why. Oh, hell, sometimes I wonder why, too. It’s not like I accomplish a whole lot all the time, it’s not like I’ve been working hard all day long. You’d think I’d have more energy at the end of the day.
I think that a lot of people under-estimate the amount of energy that is required just to care for a child; care for– that doesn’t even include all the chasing around of the kiddo that goes on, or any of the other things around the house that (may or may not) get done. I think that it’s possible that a large percentage of people don’t really consider stay-at-home moms to be doing much of anything, really.
I’m not one of those women who insist that moms have THE most important job in the world, nor do I think that stay-at-home moms are exactly under-appreciated or forgotten. The moment a person starts insisting that they are super important and should receive thanks for every little thing they do is the moment a person becomes obnoxious and arrogant and self-pitying…if they weren’t that way already.
I also don’t think that what I (what a hell of a lot of women) do is unimportant, nor do I think that stay-at-home moms are exactly recognized very much for the job they do- raising children, caring for their family. I don’t like the stereo-typical image of a homemaker lounging on the sofa, eating junk and watching soap operas.
Sometimes that stereo-type is spot on, and I make no apologies for taking breaks when I can get them.
Mothers and wives who stay at home to take care of their families are nothing to laugh at, and nothing to worship. We’re just people, doing the best we can at our jobs like most of the rest of the world. We have good days, bad days, and everything in between, just like everyone else. And we’ve got as much right as anyone with a full-time nine-to-five job to be tired at the end of the day, so if you ask me WHY I’m tired when I’ve got a sink full of dishes and the trash should have been taken out yesterday, do me the courtesy of not taking it too personally when I bite your head off.
Better yet, watch my kiddo for me so I can take a nap.
Cristen's Corner 