Tonight it was just me and the baby and I kept looking at him and getting really sad. He’s becoming more of a person and I know to say I feel a little bad about that is so morose it’s funny, but I do. He is starting to get preferences and to want things, more and more, beyond food. He’s wildly happy most of the time but sometimes he will just stare quietly and look sad if I ignore him and I want to cry. If I put him down for a minute to pee or to get a glass of water or god forbid, eat a meal, he gets so spastic and scrambly when I pick him up, his arms tight around my neck, all of him gasping and kicking. Babies do not “play it cool,” haha. Dustin thinks he is learning to miss me, though everything seems to say that he won’t develop that for a couple more months (separation anxiety). “But remember, our baby is a genius.”
My son loves me so much, is what I’m saying, and it’s making me sad, reflexively. I love him too, and it’s like, Oh god, ok, all this and love, too? Just when I thought there wasn’t room for anything else. Dustin and were talking about baby love the other day, and I was trying to say how it feels very close to romantic love for me, minus the sexual attraction obviously, but like the physical need to be close to / affectionate with him is more similar than I would have guessed. The idea that I once felt this with my own mother is wild to think about, and really sad because where is that now? I have faint memories of loving the way she smelled, too, and of wanting to rub my face on her upper arm, or remarking on how soft her skin was. Does she still feel that way with me? I can’t even think about it.
As the baby moves from alien intruder who could slip into death at any moment to person who is funny and needy and beautiful and charming and alive, the intimacy is intrusive and surprising. Sometimes he looks at me across the chasm between his barely-there personhood and my own, and I am shocked. And a little creeped out, to be honest, like he must be a ghost or God or some universal something or other, communing with me on the changing table.
It’s been wild to experience new love alongside the, for me, intense personal transformative shit of becoming a mother. They should be one and the same I guess and maybe they are. But on the one hand I feel this wild desire to be alone and to think and to write. I feel a stronger Self than I ever have, almost as a defensive move I suspect, as I feel like the world wants me to give it up. Catholics talk about “dying to self” when you get married, and certainly when you have kids. I am worried someone is going to snatch my Self out from under me, so I’m scrambling and kicking my legs and wrapping my arms around its neck.
And then my baby is reclining in his Boppy and staring at me and his face breaks out into a smile and we laugh together and I think, Oh fuck, dude, you are really in for it, out here with us. I am so so sorry.
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