22 and MomPosted by admin on May 31st, 2009
Welcome, friends and strangers! This is my inaugural post for this blog. While I’ve done my share of blogging before, I have never been regular or focused about it. Recently, though, I have found myself with plenty of time on my hands and thoughts on my mind, and I’ve come back to the one thing that provides me with clarity: writing.
Since so much of my day involves caring for a 17-month-old, I live in fear of my brain dissolving into mush while I read baby books and sing “La Linda Manita” a thousand times over. It’s only been a year since I graduated from college, but in many ways, I feel like I have reverted 20 years since I boxed up my cap and gown, to the forgotten days when splashing in the tub and banging pots and pans were the proverbial “cat’s meow.”
Given that I have embarked upon the intimidating journey of applying to Ph.D. programs in Political Theory, those fears will be allayed all too rapidly. Yet, the prospect of returning to the turbulent world of academia with a baby in tow (and hopefully a few more to come) presents its own set of fears. As I chase after my son to recover the GRE vocabulary flashcards with which he manages to abscond daily, I wonder how I ever managed to complete my last semester at Rollins (and a 100-page thesis that now gathers dust) with a newborn in my arms. And, do those few months of exhaustion and stress make me qualified for 5, 6, even 7 years of reading thousands of pages a week?
When I said that I have plenty of time on my hands, I meant relative to most other periods in my life. Time in the timeless sense, which only counts on the playground and in the rocking chair, is what I have. Time in the uber-productive sense, which used to be the only kind I knew, has long since hidden its face in this house (tiny apartment). I am fortunate enough to work as a tutor for just a few hours a day, frequently online, but even those hours tend to be filled with babyness. I cannot count the number of times I have been teaching double-vowel sounds to a 4th-grader and nursing my oversized one-year-old as he kicks at my microphone.
There are days when I plead for this phase of parenthood — the one that’s about keeping your child from diving off the couch — to be over. Even on those days, though, I marvel at the fact that people 10 or 20 years older than me are doing the same thing, and staying alive. I may not have planned to meet my first baby at age 21, but I always knew that I wanted to have a house full of them. I am thrilled that my husband and I can revel in the fun, silly moments of parenting without having to clear a multi-generational gap, and that my parents will be around to witness all the same milestones in my children’s lives as I will. I am relieved that my body is in the stage in which it can produce children easily, and that those children will be healthy. Most of all, I am oddly grateful for the presence of a dependent in the period of great struggle that is building a family. When I worry about where we will be tomorrow, much less ten years from now, all it takes is one utterance of “Mommy” to make me profoundly aware of why doing things “backwards” was the best thing I ever did.
So, that’s what this blog is about. The same things every mom goes through, only from the perspective of someone in her early twenties who is still establishing her own identity.