The perfect trilogy, performed first by Steven Tyler and the boys and now by me.

I prefer my words to be coming out rather than going back down. What I’m saying is, I don’t like it when I have to eat them. And there has been some substantial word-chewing over here these days. The Husband likes to laugh about the proclamations I made pre-baby, things like, “We’ll just drop his ass off at daycare” and “We’ll just drop his ass off with a baby-sitter.” Now I sob the whole way home from dropping his ass off at daycare, and when TH asks if I’m ready yet to leave him for a few hours and go to dinner and a movie, I just shake me head violently and hold The Kid as I curl into the fetal position, whispering “Nononononono,” over and over.

I am becoming something I never imagined I would be. I am becoming, it seems, a real live mother.

And like the rest of my life–when will I ever learn?–it looks completely different from what I envisioned. Fear has a way of darkening my doorstep no matter how many times I swore I’d vanquished it, like the villain in a bad horror movie who just. won’t. die. I wake up at night and imagine TK at daycare, helplessly lying on an activity mat as other snot-encrusted kids wobble around him, and I can’t go back to sleep. I think of bottles to be made, of clothes to be washed, of everything. Everything that fills our life now, turning up as specters in the night destroying my peace rather than light-filled blessings inspiring gratitude. This is what I do, what I guess we all do to some degree in our broken human condition, this ingratitude and faithlessness and fearfulness. This calling of good bad, this unholy renaming of story elements as complications rather than plot points, obstacles rather than inspirations. I am making life harder, and I want to stop. Especially now that it’s not just my life in the balance.

I did dentistry for the day yesterday, filling in at a local office, and I was pleased to see that reacquiring hand skills with a drill are, indeed, similar to riding a bike. (Then again, I’ve always been a little shaky on a bike.) I picked up the technique right where I’d left it a few months ago, but the day was different from the days then. When your heart has been invaded and ravaged and left open and raw, nothing looks the same. I called to check on him. I looked at his picture as I crept away every three hours to pump. I craved talks with The Husband, assurances that we are doing the right thing. Our circle of three gets stretched every day now as we’re in a trio of separate places, and it’s eating me alive. Not to be melodramatic or anything.

The Kid is doing just great, I should mention. He loves the activity mat and the buggy rides and the constant scenes to observe at daycare, and he sleeps just perfectly at night. It’s his mother who is a wreck, sobbing unpredictably like she just went through a bad breakup whenever a slow song comes on the radio or just…whenever.

There’s really no resolution here to end on, no pretty five-hundred-word bow to wrap up this post, and that’s what scares me sometimes: this is the rest of my life, this constant series of letting go, of releasing him into the wild of the world and trusting that the inevitable scars from it–and me–will make him, with redemption’s hand, into the person he’s meant to be. I wish it wasn’t so hard. I wish I was less emotional and more objective. Or do I?

The Yankee Mom handed me an envelope the last time she visited, photocopied pages of my favorite thing–words–and I sat down to read them recently. Their author is Meg Barnhouse, who, like YM, is a different kind of believer than I am but a believer nonetheless–a believer in something beyond herself, at least. She wrote of having her son:

Being a parent is not for the faint of heart…love is hard on the heart. Your heart can’t remain perfect and proud, unscarred and perky. It will be worn and joyous, wise and beat up, and full of sorrow and amazement. It will tremble with the awful knowledge of how helpless you are to keep him from pain, of how closely he will watch you to see what to become and what not to become. I would rather have this heart than the one I had before…

All this time I expected it to be easy. While it was meant to be…amazing.

Don’t you hate it when someone cries in front of you, subjecting you to that awkward moment of deciding how to respond: sympathy, shoulder, avoidance? Don’t you hate that?

You would have hated me this morning.

Today is The Kid’s first day of school–Outsourced Childcare, as The Husband calls it. I cried at multiple moments throughout the weekend imagining the drop-off of the package. Last night, my scarce sleep was punctuated by wake-up calls delivered in the form of concerns for every aspect of his well-being in the time he spends away from home…and me. And this morning?

Well.

I remember when I first found out I was pregnant, the days of nausea and discomfort that followed, and the underlying fear: What if I’m not capable of this kind of love? After all, during dental school I purchased a beagle puppy from a breeder and took it back the next day after I realized how under-equipped I was for the responsibility of a life dependent on mine. And a baby? You can’t take a baby back.

It turns out that fear was woefully unfounded. If you want proof, ask TH about my antics this morning. We crossed the threshold of the daycare, TH toting TK in his carrier, and the head teacher greeted us. “Hi! How are y’all doing?” she asked.

In response, I burst into tears–the ugly kind, where you can’t catch your breath and you choke on your own snot and your face is screwed up so that you resemble a newborn just delivered. “I’m sorry, I’m just going to be a wreck,” I sobbed and stammered. I was met with graciousness from all corners: TH put his arm around me, the teacher assured me I could call a hundred times to check in, TK even took a break from finger-slurping to smile up from his car seat. We took him to his classroom and handed him over–along with the one-page bio I had written about him (that is probably being laughed at right now due to its existence, its specificity, or both). TH and I headed back to the car and I released another flood. And so the day began.

The ripping sensation I felt in my heart as we drove away, that I feel now as the tears rise to the surface, reminded me of another painful moment in my life: the day I drove north from Birmingham in a U-Haul headed toward New York City. I cried throughout that two-day trip as I felt the cord connecting me to home stretch ever more tightly across hundreds of miles.

I’m pretty sure I’ve told you how that story ended, but in case you’re new, just read the last line of any fairy tale.

Now we’re in the after-the-happily-ever-after part. The story continues.

There are parts of our stories that require us to tell ourselves the truth, over and over again, yelling it to our hearts sometimes because the crap the world tells us is so loud. Like the form of it delivered to two of my friends lately, on separate occasions, by other mothers; these friends have kids in daycare too, and were on the receiving end of a line of judgement from mothers who rendered the following passive-aggressive accusation: “I could just never let someone else take care of my kid every day.” To those types–the types who assume that stories can only be told one way, and that their personal authorship is unequivocally labeled BEST–I would like to issue my own proclamation. And I will choose, thank you very much, to let Someone else hold the pen as I make scratch notes with my pencil; I will listen to true friends, the kind who tell you what one of mine did recently in an email, and I quote:

Anyway, whether you are at home or working, it is lots of dying to yourself which is just painful and confusing. But totally worth it.

Because here’s the thing: love makes life so much harder. Freedom, as I used to define it, is gone. But that freedom consisted of days spent pursuing my own comfort. Life is no longer black-and-white, good and bad, but streaked with gray areas that do not invite your speculation into my story, thank you very much. The life I had before I opened the door to grace was that black-and-white, right-and-wrong kind, the kind where I carried around a label-making kit and affixed my judgment on everyone. Now? I’m discovering that I may be more of a relativist than I thought, as I consider what I know to be true and realize that the Author has a story in mind for each of us–and that kind of individuality shuts my mouth and my planner and renders me in awe of all the stories there are to tell. Stories of letting go, of dying to self, of waving goodbye at the entrance to the school and hugging hello hours later. Stories of a million different ways to love.

I always said I would be Cool Mom. Cool Mom is laid back, doesn’t let the little stuff get to her, has a plan and sticks to it without drama, without ruffling of feathers and sweating of pits. Cool Mom drops The Kid off with a kiss and confidence and goes about her day. Cool Mom is sure of what she does, that it is right and good.

I AM NOT COOL MOM.

The only cool, laid-back thing about my parenting these days is my diaper bag, an emblem of my pre-kid ideas about identity and independence. It’s filled with wipes and onesies and stained with spit-up now, having weathered the initial storms of actual, not theoretical, motherhood. Kind of like me.

The other day I had the opportunity to drop TK off at a church-sponsored nursery so that I could interact with other mothers. I wheeled the Graco up to the door as TK slurped on his hand. The woman accepting child deposits, forgive me, looked like she had seen better days. And it looked like those days had included lots of smoking and more than a few drinks. She hacked into her hand and I was reasonably certain that part of her lung had come up. I looked down at TK, still happily slurping, and I considered just turning around and running. She didn’t even use hand sanitizer, for God’s sake! TK grinned up at me and my worrying ways. I glanced around frantically, searching for the least conspicuous exit and ruing that the only option out was the door through which I entered. The woman ahead of me pushed her screaming toddler through the door, the line moved forward, and there we were: one happy baby and one anxious mother.

I must have had A Look on my face (I usually do), because the Child Taker quickly piped up, “I’m not sick. I’ve been to the doctor.” “Allergies?” I asked hopefully. “It’s just some scar tissue on my esophagus,” she replied. Gross, I thought. And thanks for that image. I reluctantly handed TK over and he was promptly dropped into a swing. Walking away, I felt tears spring to my eyes and I ducked into the nearest bathroom to let them flow.

So not Cool Mom.

When I picked him up an eternity (hour) later, TK was in the same swing. He had spit-up on the front of his super-cute outfit. But he was, as The Husband would say, fine. He placed his head on my shoulder and I wondered what stories he would tell me if he could, what had happened in my absence. After I placed him in his carrier, he looked up at me expectantly with a  “What next, Mommy?” look. “A stiff drink and a Xanax chaser,” I wanted to say.

Yesterday we went to a play group, and before we left TK sat in his carrier on the counter while I rushed around, gathering our gear. “Do I have everything?” I asked him in my perpetual narration, and I glanced over to see him grin at me. As if to acknowledge my craziness and respond with his own coolness, so not reflective of me. And I realized that’s okay. I don’t have to be Cool Mom.

Because he looked just like his dad.

The light bulb went off sometime yesterday: the hardest part of being a mom is that I’m still me.

I’m still impatient. I still demand my own way. I’m still rigid. I still value getting everything “right” over seeing the beauty in messes. I’m still too hard on myself. I still set unrealistic expectations. I still have latent anger. I still jump to worry as an initial reaction. None of that was excised when they cut me open and pulled out a baby.

Rather than extinguishing them, parenthood has a way of taking each of those characteristics and magnifying them to epic proportions.

So God, in his epic wisdom and sense of humor, made me the wife of someone whose stock response to everything from “Do you think he’s too warm?” to “Why is his spit-up purple?” is “I’m sure he’s fine.” The other day, when I had yet another meltdown (think Andy from The Office throwing wall punches over a missing cell phone), I told TH that maybe I need to re-darken my counselor’s doorway. He replied, “Or you could just pump a bottle and go to the mall.” TH is from California, where they apparently dole out mellowness in the hospital nursery, but he’s also just more of a positive person than I am.  Parenthood has a way of taking our differences and magnifying them to epic proportions.

Sunday, we were trying to leave for church. TH held The Kid as I tried to squirt his reflux medicine into his tiny mouth, and since he was wearing the Ralph Lauren onesie that a dear friend gave him, most of the Prevacid came back out and onto said onesie. Of course. I gritted my teeth and hurled out a house-rattling sigh, and I felt TH looking at me, taking in all my craziness. Which only made me more anxious. Because when I look at someone like that, I’m judging them.

What he does is look for ways to make things easier on me.

While uptightness is my currency, language, and constitution, he is calm and level-headed. He balances me out. And I like to think I do the same for him–I mean, who among us couldn’t use more crazy in their lives? But what I really like to think is that our balancing act will pass on to TK, who will not be afraid to get his clothes dirty…or put them in the washing machine later on the correct cycle.

I am a creature of routine, not adventure. But this pressure cooker of life with a newborn, and every day of life subsequent to it, is meant to be nothing less than an adventure. Which means that I get to be either the crazy lady on the sidelines of the game yelling out instructions to players on the field who aren’t listening, or I have to get dirty myself. Now that TK is here, and the three of us are a family, there is more than ever at stake. In his wordless silences, I watch his face and see the blank canvas that he is; I know that one thing he does not need is thirty-four years of cultivated anxiety heaped upon his perfect features. So I take deep breaths, and I ask others for help, and I pray, and I remember that a sense of humor can be life-saving–and I call to mind this scene. And I laugh and tell TK that, by God’s grace, I won’t put all my stuff on him. Then I remember that I will make a million mistakes, but that’s okay, because I’ve already made a million and not a single one has gone unredeemed. Which is how I got here in the first place.

In this edition of Things I Never Thought I’d Hear, See, or Do Before I had a kid:

HEAR: Yesterday I called the doctor with my symptoms and was told I should be seen right away. A couple of hours later, I walked away with a prescription and a diagnosis. The diagnosis, which was given after my reply of yes to the question “Does it feel like knives running through your chest?”: intraductal candidiasis. What’s that, you ask? Why, it means that my tit has a yeast infection. Thank you very much. Something I never knew existed, much less ever expected to hear. Apparently it can come from me (that pesky boob sitting in a wet bikini too long by the pool) or The Kid (his moist, warm–eww–mouth is a breeding ground for such fungi), and we can pass it to each other. Like herpes! The gift that keeps on giving, until you go to Target and get your prescription filled. And TK rips the loudest fart ever in that linoleum-floored, acoustically gifted environment.

SEE: Doody on male genitalia. Tiny male genitalia. To the point that I have to go on an expedition every time I change his diaper, poking around his double marble set and mini-wiener (“Excuse me, it’s actually quite large”–The Husband) for stray smears of curry-colored or green-tinged delights. I’m used to a small canvas–I work with teeth, after all, when I work–but these jewels need to be protected, and gingerly is putting it mildly for how I deal with them. TH put it best the other night when he was changing TK’s diaper and proclaimed, “You know, in all my planning for the future, I just never saw myself wiping down baby balls.”

DO: If you’re still reading (haha, those other pansies, always so easily offended!), the following account may remedy that. I had a slight fever when the nurse took my temperature at said doctor’s office, and as a result was paranoid about TK’s warmness for the rest of the day. We took an armpit temperature, which is not entirely accurate but lightened my concern a bit. Then this morning, he had three dirty diapers in the span of an hour and was super-fussy (read: a-hole behavior). So I rolled up my hoodie sleeves, pulled out my iPhone, and Googled “how to take a rectal temperature.” A minute later, I was lubing up the thermometer and saying prayers to avoid perforations of the rectal persuasion. I was in there for awhile–like, prison-level duration–without the thermometer beeping, but when a stream of poo covered the tip of the stick I decided it was time to exit. The reading was 99.1. Now, I like to consider myself a pretty accomplished lass, but let me tell you, when I retrieved that device after a successful performance and subsequently put TK down for a non-feverish nap, I felt like I had climbed Everest. Kind of like I do every time he smiles.

Does anyone else hear that bottle of wine calling my name from the other room?

This is the kind of love people run away from, build up walls to protect themselves against. This is the kind of love that overtakes the runner and tears down the walls, that penetrates the heart and puts everything else in its rightful place.

This is the kind of love I felt when The Husband and I first got together and I knew–here was the one who would stick. I boarded the plane home and, for the first time, didn’t like to fly. We hit turbulence and I thought of all I would miss, all I would lose if we didn’t stay in the air. I realized that, if I gave in to this kind of love, I would always be a target for that kind of fear.

This is the kind of love that transforms the nature of a cry from simply annoying to heart-rending. This is the kind of love that laughs at jokes that are amateur at best, knock-knocks that don’t even make sense. This kind of love wears its vomit on its sleeve, picks noses with clean fingernails, distributes kisses like water. This love takes too many pictures and overposts them. This love squeals with delight over one coo, over a half-smile. This love studies hair whorls and tiny toes and notices the slightest red spot on skin or difference in stool patterns. This love turns long nights at the bar into long nights at the crib. This love turns the next-day hangover into the next-day exhausted stupor–not much different except for the lack of toilet-hugging, it turns out. This love makes me over into the cheesy, baby-talking mess I always secretly laughed at in others. This love renders a monitor screen into a movie screen, where a static picture becomes an engrossing image.

This love is equal parts pain and joy, frustration and accomplishment, exhausting and invigorating. This love is terrifying. This love is fluent in the language of sacrifice, the dialect passed down perfectly by only one, giving and giving and giving without waiting for return.

This love is the only kind worth living for.

The Kid will be three months old tomorrow.

Thank God.

We were told that six weeks and three months are benchmarks, that joy and order arrive with them. But all that arrived with six weeks was a growth spurt and increased fussiness, and the light at the end of the tunnel grew dim. But three months? Well, thank you for being right. Because three months, in comparison, feels a little like heaven.

A heaven without sleeping in until 10 am on Saturdays, but still.

The light grew brighter a few weeks ago, when I realized that TK no longer resembled a generic newborn alien but was developing features and expressions with context and personality. The smiles finally arrived, like spring after a long winter, and he was holding his head up a little. His sleeping through the night endured, and his naptime grew more organized. I could meet The Husband at the door like I did during our honeymoon-newlywed days with a smile on my face and cookies on the counter rather than with a screaming baby and threats of leaving.

And there was, of course, the magical Bob.

When TK and I go on our walks, I’m pushing at least twenty pounds around, often uphill. And I can’t tell you how much I prefer it to carrying around that kind of weight while pregnant. He alternately sleeps and observes, and I alternately blare music through my headphones and take them off to talk to him.

We’re becoming friends. I’m waving the white flag. He has conquered us–in the best possible way.

I think back over the predictions and plans I made, the proclamations stemming from an over-read, objective mind: the vow that I would never be one of those people who over-posted on Facebook; that the routine would be iron-clad; that babies just cry and I would not let it wear me down.

A funny thing happened on the way home from the hospital: objectivism, the little traitor, abandoned me.

How was I supposed to know how his cry would puncture my heart and sanity? How could I have predicted the double-sided nature of flexibility? And just how might I have guessed that this little thing would be so cute that to not post pictures on Facebook would be to deprive the world of greatness?

A friend emailed me this week with stories of her own newborn, and we did the thing that saves new moms’ lives: we commiserated. I learned that I was not the only one to issue middle-of-the-night threats of suicide that would be deeply and red-facedly regretted the next morning. I learned that I was not alone. But then, I learn that a lot. I just keep forgetting it.

Yesterday TK and I headed home through a playground area and I spotted a chalk-drawn hopscotch board. I remembered the mom who, during last week’s tornadoes, lost a foot and half a leg by covering her children with her body. The kids escaped without a scratch. I remembered this, and I considered the days behind us, of exhaustion and insanity and rampant complaints. I know there will always be difficult times, and to that end, you will find them recorded here. But as I pushed my ever-growing, yet ever-lightening load past a relic from my own childhood that I’ll one day share with TK, I could only give thanks that our own storms thus far have been so wonderfully small yet full of grace; how we have been covered and kept and unscathed through them all.