“Sometimes,” I admit to her, looking around to make sure no one can hear me, but we’re here alone except for The Kid and I guess it’s his ears I want to protect, “I hear him cry at night and the very last thing I want to do is get out of bed and feed him.”

Eyes meet mine in understanding and I’m not judged. She tells me a story from a mutual friend, who had an unexpected half-day off work and chose to spend it seeing a movie and going to happy hour with her husband rather than pick her son up early from day care and take him to the park. The second option being the one she felt she was supposed to do–or, more importantly, supposed to want to do. She ran into a neighbor and admitted her actual plan, the non-child-friendly one, then burst into guilty tears. The neighbor smiled and told her that taking care of herself and her marriage for an afternoon was closer to the right thing than she knew. The email conversation among friends that resulted from that story was filled with laughter, tears, and identification. None of us can be everything we want to be; forget everything we think others want us to be.

The Kid is definitely making up for a quiet first few weeks, and his wails grip my heart and send me alternately toward insanity and pity. The Sis told me what she learned in nursing school–that the infant’s cry is meant to be piercing, especially to a mother. It’s nothing short of biology, designed to alert her the only way the baby can. The trouble is discerning the type of cry, the one that must be attended vs. the one that will trail off on its own. But both pierce; both frustrate. Last night, TK cried for the first time when we put him to bed. I realize what a blessing it is that he usually goes down quietly, at least at night, but as The Husband and I listened from our room and waited for which cry it would be, my ears reacted as they would to fingernails on a chalkboard while my heart felt ripped down the middle. And I realized my twofold interpretation of the cry. It is equal parts blessing: lungs that function, sign of life; and curse: commentary on my inability to fix everything. I thanked God for the cry even as biologically-driven anxiety flooded my veins.

My soothing voice sounds fake to me. I remember the first time I heard The Sis whisper gently to The Niece and I marveled at her transformation, her softening; then we went downstairs and had a glass of wine and I realized she was the same person. Same, but different. When the Bro-in-Law offered to come over today and keep TK while I took an hour for myself, I said hell yes–the same thing I might say if, for instance, I was faced with an unexpected half-day off work and was offered a movie and happy hour. Doesn’t mean I love TK less, just means I’m once again juggling all that makes me who I am. Identity becomes trickier once you have kids, but mine won’t be tricky in the sense that I lose it in them. And somehow, that makes me able to love him more. Or maybe just better. As I put feet to pavement this morning and ran for the first time since my early pregnancy, I fell into a rhythm that initially took me further from home, further from my little buddy. I felt it coming back to me, the cadence of steps and the working of my body like it used to before TK, and I marveled at the transformation–and lack of it–since he’s come along. Somehow, in the past few months, I’ve stayed a runner even while absent from it–and become a mom, even when I’m absent from him. I turned my face to the sun, flipped the volume up, and traveled the path that would become a circle leading home.

“Don’t you just love being a mom?” the voice on the phone said, an echo of the question posed by my lactation consultant last week.

I decided to tell the truth now as I did then. “Sometimes,” I responded.

Thankfully, earlier in the day, I had indulged in a kid-dominated lunch with a like-minded friend, one to whom I can vent and not be complaining, one to whom I can exult and not be bragging. We commiserated and we laughed, and though I couldn’t complete a sentence without turning to The Kid to monitor his breathing, there was rest. There is always rest in being with those who know.

The question was posed a few hours later, from an older friend whose children are grown, and it came after what is now known around here as The Evening Fussy Period. This phenomenon is documented in books and maternal folklore, but–as with all things child-rearing–there is no way to really prepare for it. Which is why, at around 6 pm last night, I was sitting on my bathroom floor with TK propped up on my thighs as the hair dryer lay on the floor beside us in the ON position.

Ten minutes later, TK had grown weary of that distraction. So we headed back downstairs, where I propped him up on my thighs and placed my iPhone at a safe distance from his ear and turned on my new White Noise app. That worked for about five minutes.

Sometime during these efforts, I realized the particular form of insanity in which I am now enmeshed; the hair dryers and white noise and vibrating chairs and “Sh-shing” and swings and tiptoeing because he knows my smell. The fact that I am inextricably tethered to this new life form, and that this connection fundamentally changes me whether I like it or not.

There are times when I like it. There are times when I don’t. Hence, the answer, “Sometimes.”

What is not in question is my love for the little boy. I look at him, and that love floods me –mentally, emotionally, chemically. He keeps me homebound some days, avoiding the cold. He accompanies me out into the world on others, resting in his stroller as I check out bras and underwear at Victoria’s Secret semi-annual sale. I remember when I headed for silk instead of cotton, then I look at his face and know that sacrifice is the only worthy dialect of love–and I am learning love all over again. Willingly…sometimes.

The Husband calls on his way home from work and I raise TK a little closer to the phone, making sure those decibels extend optimally across the line. I know I’m being a baby myself, but I can’t help it: it’s my milk that’s keeping this child alive, my life lived in three-hour increments, my watch constantly glanced at and the monitor on my bedside keeping me up at night. There is the danger a personality given to self-protection like mine constantly faces, the temptation to languish in bitterness and resentment, to wrap them around me like a cold steel blanket. Then I remember that it will never be just me again. I feel myself strain against the tethers: the tether to TK, calling me for another feeding. The tether to TH, calling me to understanding. What tethers me? What holds me together?

And I breathe, knowing. Sometimes breathing itself can be a form of prayer.

I know what keeps this all from becoming a shouting match, an episode of Jerry Springer, a hot mess. I know what makes it more than I can see, more than I can feel in any one moment, just…more. I know what makes this beautiful, even though, as my friend said across the lunch table, right now is just an investment that will pay off later. I know what transforms later into now, yet into here. I know what makes the mundane sacred.

I breathe, and the tether holds.

Maybe it’s just the oxytocin talking, but I have to say: I love this kid.

Not an earth-shattering revelation from a mother, but if I’m being honest, I have to admit to a level of fear beforehand; fear that even after he arrived, I’d be scraping my emotional depths for something other than exhaustion or resentment. And in the early days, after The Husband pulled up in the turnaround and collected The Kid and me from the wheelchair and we left the warm embrace of the hospital, my emotional landscape rivaled Hiroshima: constant tears and feelings of inadequacy; the annoying liar in the back of my mind questioning, “What have you done?”

Things have leveled off a bit. Though when I see a commercial touting Caribbean vacations or watch a travel show devoted to Paris or read an article about the wines of Spain, I turn to TH and we grieve just a little, then make promises and a list.

Not for nothing, we apparently have Baby Extraordinaire on our hands. He has backed off to one night feeding, and I’ve even gotten to the point of enjoying that: bonding and whispers in the dark; being privy to wee- hour revelations like the winner of the Iowa caucus. He rarely cries, and then only if he loses his paci or is dealing with his usual extreme gas (sorry, Kid–it’s genetics). We spend most of our time around the house, but when we do go out, his car seat is apparently laced with Ambien because he strolls through Target or Barnes and Noble with nary a peep. Right now, he’s lounging in his Pack ‘n Play beside me, dreaming about chasing rabbits and letting me write. And yes, I am knocking on wood with one hand and typing with the other.

One of the best parts of it all is, he has partnered with God in the theme of proving me gloriously wrong about so much. To wit, here are some things I never imagined saying/thinking before TK arrived:

Buddy, you have GOT to quit letting go of my boob!

Is it normal for his poop to be this green? It looks like seaweed.

Hold on–let me tuck your wiener in!

Dammit, I’m leaking milk on the floor again.

How cute are those little balls?

We have a rhythm to our days now, the series of feedings every three hours interspersed with naps and book-guided periods of wakefulness, but I find that no matter how well things are going, that ever-present need for approval follows me doggedly around, a relic from my extended childhood that must constantly be answered with vigilant grace. There are my constant questions to The Sis, which she (somewhat) patiently listens to, usually responding with a variation of, “Stop worrying. Everything is fine.” I even went to the extreme of hauling his seven-pound frame, along with the drugged car seat and stroller, to Northside Hospital in twenty-degree temps so that I could hear a lactation consultant tell me the same thing (thank you, Cigna and nipple trauma codes). But in the moments of quiet, when I am still enough for grace to attend me and truth to rise to the top, I remember that we–the three of us–are exactly where we are meant to be (even if, regrettably, that is not in a vineyard in Spain). Not to get all Tebow on your asses, but I do believe that God chose us to be TK’s parents. No one else would do; all our qualities and imperfections are ideally suited for him to allow his story to be told. Conveniently, such a belief affords me blissful freedom: no matter what I do, something bigger holds all this together beyond my ability to screw it up. And though, these days, quality control is minimal (feed, burp, sleep; lather, rinse, repeat), I know one day there will be the back-and-forth of relationship, of love offered in a million ways, of mistakes made and grace required; and hopefully I will still be admittedly weak enough then to hold his hand, look upward, and wait for grace to rain down once again.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

On our ride back from Target yesterday–my first non-medical outing in, like,  forever–I asked The Husband why more people don’t talk honestly about how hard it is to bring a child into the world. And keep him here. The implication being that they are either our enemies or liars by omission. We came up with a list of reasons: some people don’t like to complain as much as we (I) do; others are better at handling sleeplessness; discussing it brings back painful memories; the people in the middle of it are just too tired to talk. Then there are those who consider it bad form to use anything other than glowing terms to describe the miracle of children.

I am not one of those people.

My newborn currently sits beside me in his swing, white noise blaring, as I type. He may fall asleep or start screaming–only time (in the form of a few seconds) will tell. TH and I sleep at night, in spurts, in the silvery light of a baby monitor and watch The Kid as his noises light the monitor’s audio section up from green to red. We place a fresh diaper underneath his newly wiped ass and observe the slow-motion avalanche of shit and geyser of piss that spew onto the clean white surface. I finally remove all the surgical band-aids from my C-section incision and see that my belly looks like Frankenstein’s monster. I feel helpless for a large portion of my day, and exhausted for all of it.

BUT.

My newborn currently sits beside me in his swing.

I went to bed at 9 pm on New Year’s Eve, but TH and TK and I were up when the ball dropped, TH sitting beside me and TK hanging off my Milk Dispensary Unit. TH leaned over and gave each of us a kiss at midnight. For TK’s 4 am feeding this morning, I flipped channels until I found a suitably bad movie to fall in and out of sleep to: What Happens in Vegas. I remembered the last time I saw this movie, and I was falling in and out of sleep then too: it was on a night flight to Italy with three of my girlfriends, and I was in the initial stages of an Ambien cocoon. In the dim lights of my child’s nursery, I took on a dangerous proposition: comparing the two viewings.

The nursery viewing won.

Sure, back in August of ’08 I was headed to a wine-soaked European locale with dear friends, and I made some lifetime memories there. Back then, TH was only a friend, though. Back then, I had a lot of fun, but I drank way too much and made some questionable choices and woke up with a lot of headaches and regrets. It was a blast, but there was a price to pay. Even though I was where I was supposed to be, I always felt a bit…adrift. Incomplete. Self-obsessed.

Now, there’s a price to pay too. I have to hand over sleep and self-centeredness and vanity at the register to be here. This place requires other-worldly patience and demands faith: faith in myself, faith in my marriage, faith in the potential of this human being to one day sleep through the night and smile back at me for reasons other than gas.

Never before have my human selfishness and a greater sacrifice collided so forcefully and exacted so much of my own comfort.

But the payoff…what now feels few and far between–those moments of utter peace and euphoria–will multiply upon themselves. This family unit that we are and are becoming holds a home for my heart and reminds me that there is a design on my life, that there is more–more, even, than booze cruises and Italian sunsets. I see the image of Elmo stare back at me underneath TK’s belly from that streaked diaper at 4 am, and through all the literal crap I feel a tsunami-sized surge of love. Love that transforms gastric explosions and nighttime cries and sleeplessness and scars. Love that makes all things beautiful, urine fountains included. Love that has a Source, and therefore no end. Love that, through bleary eyes and sacrifice, asks for everything and gives it in return.

(But seriously? You a-holes should have done a better job of warning me.)

There are liabilities that come along with being…well, me. One of them is the tendency to approach all of life formulaically, knowing that there is one right answer in every circumstance. That approach worked well for much of my life, when achievement was marked by multiple choices and test scores and rankings, and I was a professional test-taker, a.k.a. student, and a good one at that.

Real life is so not about scores. It is not summed up in A, B, C, or D, and it does not congratulate my ability to make the highest grade at the expense of getting out from behind a desk.

I’ve been driving myself crazy, see. Reading all these books and blogs and trying to draft a single airtight plan that will cover our new life, with its feedings and changings and sleepings. Meanwhile, The Kid farts nonstop in his Pack ‘n Play sleeper (he is so going to burn me for that in his next blog entry) and hiccups and purses his lips cutely and, generally, does not give one tiny rat’s ass about how many books I’ve read because he is not–despite his diminutive but growing size–so easily summarized. I called The Sis the other day to ask her about schedules and clusters and other topics I knew nothing about a few weeks ago, and her answer? You just have to let go of all that. Accept that, especially these first few weeks (and, oh yeah, all of life from now on), life is controlled chaos. When he’s hungry, he needs to eat. When he’s tired, he will sleep. And he will not consult a book before doing so.

So I went back to the blog I was reading but skipped ahead to the comments section, and what did I find but a bunch of lost, confused moms like myself who just want to be directed…and validated. Life’s central quest, now directed in the vein of child-rearing, but no less potent: Tell me I’m doing okay. And I realized that for all my searching for the one answer, I would do well to remind myself of the Indigo Girls’ thought on the matter, that “the less I seek my source for some definitive…the closer I am to fine.” Because we, you and me and he, were created a little too intricately to be defined so simply. And while the world also is too gloriously complex to be summed up by one answer for every question, that fact itself points to the greater truth: one source for those answers. A source that is carefully un-obvious and yet glaringly visible, not just in the order but in the mystery, which only too often is dressed up as chaos.

Today, I am thankful that love is stronger than a feeling.

No one can adequately describe how hard it is, these first two weeks. And I say two weeks because that’s only as much of it as I know so far. The adjustment to the reality of your heart operating outside your body is a brutal one, filled with worry and questions and a roller-coaster ride of emotions played out moment by moment. The Husband and I have been subsisting on gifts of food and DVD episodes of How I Met Your Mother, and (spoiler alert) yesterday when Marshall’s father bit it, TH turned to me, wide-eyed with concern, the remote in his hand as he prepared to press STOP. I just shook my head and whimpered, “Noooo…..”, glancing at The Kid in his little carrier and feeling the ever-present tears rise to the surface.

But. There are the moments of salvation, the times when TK grips my finger with his tiny hand, the times when TH holds him on his lap and in their faces I read our future and I know our family of three is more than what a fleeting emotion says. And there is the grace and gratitude in knowing I am doing all this with the right man, the only man with whom I can make it out of these first few weeks and all the rest alive. Because through it all, we still love; and even more importantly (or maybe just redundantly), we still laugh. And there are the moments when I have a vision of words that will pour out in their own time, ideas that will play out here, hopefully soon. Then there are the two hours from two days ago, when The Mom babysat and TH forced me gently into the car and we went to Target and hit up Starbucks as we walked around. As usual, he took his time while I felt the urge to rush, and I realized after a few minutes that this was his gift to me, these moments away…just the two of us, living out grace in the diaper aisle.

I’m living life between feedings.

Just one of the things I didn’t realize the full impact of until The Kid was born nine days ago. Another? The overwhelming emotion that would accompany his arrival. Yes, I knew I’d love him. But this? This is unreal. It is protective, hormonal, instinctive, mysterious, primal. The love I have for The Husband is passionate and abiding and iron-clad and bathed in laughter and shared vision; it makes me feel safe. This love I have for TK is dangerous–raw and searing, humbling and at turns sweet and potent.

I didn’t expect this.

I keep reminding myself that the hormones at war within my body, aided by sleeplessness, can confuse and terrify me. And it’s true–I have to calm myself down sometimes, remember what I believe and who ultimately keeps this life safe. But the love…

That part’s real.

I knew I was in trouble one afternoon while we were still at the hospital and TH went out to grab food. I was flipping through the channels as TK lay in his bassinet, sleeping beside me. Shaun of the Dead was just beginning on a movie channel, and I felt a sense of relief: finally, something funny instead of scary or sad. TH introduced me to this film a few years ago and I thought it was hilarious. Cut to me two hours later, fighting off tears upon the film’s conclusion, shaking my head at all the broken relationships and loss of life. Because of the zombies, I mean.

A few hours later, a pair of emotional manipulators dressed as photographers came by our room. In a service provided by the hospital, they offered to take pictures of our new family. I was hesitant to humor them, but TH is nicer than I am, so they did their thing. A sales pitch came next–birth announcements! Photo packages! Then the photographs were downloaded to a computer and the professional wheeled the screen over to us to present a slide show she had created, our pictures set to cheesy music and placed side-by-side with quotes about the meaning of life and love. My eyes welled up even as I knew I was being played.

You bitch, I thought, wiping my eyes on TH’s shoulder.

There is simply nothing scarier than loving this much, than loving our new family like I do. And while I know there’s also nothing better or more true, I’m also aware that it’s possible to misdirect love, to love from the wrong angle or to love more from a broken place than a whole one. No one wins with that kind of love–and to be a parent who loves well, I have to learn the difference between lies and truth, between fear and assurance. So as we exist between feedings and spurts of sleep and dirty diapers and DVRed shows paused at weird spots, I am learning how to breathe. I am relearning how to pray. I am being taught how to love.

I’ve been kept from updating lately due to a certain little nugget who keeps to a pretty specific schedule.

Totally worth it.

So I’m going to work on leveling off my hormones (I watched the end of Knocked Up today, all “I’m such a veteran, I can watch this labor scene and laugh in its face,” then realized too late that the emotional component would leave me in shambles), finding indirect sunlight to help with The Kid’s jaundice, and generally adjusting to the new rhythm in which The Husband and I now reside. And in a bit, after I’ve either gotten more sleep or grown accustomed to not getting any, and after I have consistent rather than limited access to a sense of humor, I’ll be back to tell you about the coolest baby ever, and our new life with him.

It didn’t happen, of course. It never does when we plan it, how we plan it. But after a lifetime of expecting my plan to happen, then some years of watching it crumble to reveal a better one, I’m becoming better at accepting the broken expectations.

Better. Not perfect.

We jinxed ourselves in so many ways. Monday morning, I put on the smell-good lotion that I only wear for special occasions, like date nights and holidays and weekends. Then we both packed bags, threw them in the car next to the installed car seat. The counters were as shiny as I could get them without bending over too much; the vacuum had been graciously run by him. We were prepared.

Then the exam, and the news that no more dilation had occurred, and we were sent home. But we didn’t go home.

I was speechless for awhile, all the way through the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru and for a lot of our trip to Target for groceries we now needed, and The Husband asked several times if I was okay. I thought about it in the car as our bags taunted us from the backseat, as the diaper wreath for my hospital door bounced around the trunk. My flesh will always cry out against being wrong; against I told you so and feeling like a chump. I considered another week of watching for water, of timing contractions, of sleeping on numb limbs, of holding back on the wine. Of not meeting The Kid.

I felt disappointed, but I did not feel cheated.

A few years ago, that’s how I would have felt: cheated. Insulted that things didn’t turn out the way I planned, personally attacked by the audacity of One who went another way than mine. But now, I looked at the man beside me, at the bulge in my middle, at the lights strung across our porch and hearth and tree. And just like the feeling of being cheated fell away those years ago, so did the disappointment. And later that night, while TH played basketball, I turned on the TV and watched and listened as Andrea Bocelli sang in the rain at Central Park. I watched as the camera panned the midtown skyline and I remembered my weekly runs set against that skyline, the scene and my life unfolding a little more each week, the perfect amount of time it took for that plan to unfold, for us both to be ready for each other, even though I would have hurried it along if given the chance. Bocelli, unseeing eyes closed, sings the words, and I know they’re mine too–that for all the fast-forwarding I would do through life, this is where life is: in each of the moments, and in the hand that holds them. The blind man sings, and I realize that there is only one thing that takes the words and transforms them from irony to truth. Amazing grace.

I once was lost, but now I’m found

Was blind but now I see.