It’s so silent in my house right now. Luke is sleeping. The cats are sleeping. Mike is out playing darts. (He’s in a league. Yes, they have leagues for that.) I don’t have the tv on, though I will definitely by 10:00 to watch Top Chef Season 4, Episode 2. I am looking forward to that, but right now it’s just nice to rest. I have returns to work on but most are waiting for information. Tonight I’m taking a break. I need it. This has been a rough week so far. There is crap going on at work. I don’t really want to talk about it but I will say that I think it’s all going to be okay. I’ve been praying a lot and trying to remain adultish in how I behave and both those things seem to be helping. Yes, I realize I’m using words that don’t exist. It’s just one of those make-up-words days.

When I happen to have a collection of nanoseconds all in a row I tend to think about how my life looked before I was a mother. Days and weeks slipped through my fingers much more quickly. I spent my Saturdays loafing around the house and watching Lifetime movies. I spent all kinds of hours agonizing over my laziness and wallowing in guilt for not folding the laundry or vacuuming the floors. I use to analyze my life and who I was and where I was going. I was a woman of extreme thought and melancholy. Now I have become a woman of action. I have no time to waste so I do not waste time. I vacuum when I can and I fold laundry while playing with my son. I do not sleep until 11 am on Saturdays and I don’t take naps. I cherish every minute. Even when Luke naps, I can’t bring myself to nap at the same time because when you are asleep you are unconscious and you wake up feeling like you lost all that time. I want to be awake to enjoy the peacefulness and the lack of responsibility. It is such a wonderful feeling, but after awhile you start to feel weird. Weird, like something is missing. That’s when you realize that you don’t mind the responsibility so much and you look forward to the end of your baby’s nap when you can see again the light in his eyes and his big toothless grin (Yes, he’s ten months old and still no teeth).

My life has changed so much. I knew it would, that doesn’t surprises me. What surprises me is how well I’m handling it. Even though I had been waiting eagerly all those years to have a baby, I still always had some apprehension that maybe I wasn’t up for it. Maybe I wouldn’t have the energy or the patience or the mental capacity. I didn’t have those things much before and what surprises me is that God is giving me all those things now, now that I need them (the verdict is still out on the mental capacity). I cannot believe all the things I am able to accomplish in a week and still have all my hair by Sunday. There are days when I plop down and say I’m so tired I can’t do a thing more, but then I rest for five minutes and somehow find the motivation to do what needs to be done. Anyone who knows me knows that is a miracle. I am the queen of relaxation and finding the easy way out.

I don’t have a caboose for this train of thought. I’m terrible at openers and closers. Why don’t I just leave you with these famous last words: “Don’t touch the red button!”

Sorry, I have a weird sense of humor.

From a January 2008 podcast of “A Prairie Home Companion’s News from Lake Wobegon”:

I had a boy under the old system of parenthood, back before most of you were born. This under the old system, where men were out busy hunting and fighting heathen savages and we were just brought into villages for breeding purposes then we wandered off again and we’d come back to see the child after the child was born. We’d walk in smeared with blood and one ear half chewed off wrapped in animal skins and we’d walk in and look at the child and we’d grunt and then we’d go off and hunt and fight some more and eventually the child sort of grew up on his own and you came  back and here was this young man there.

And now to have a child under the new system of parenthood, in which parents are assumed to be vitally involved in every step of their child’s life and arrange their children’s social life and read every book available on the subject of childrearing, which is like having a second unpaid job.

Makes me nostalgic for the old way that I grew up under. (more…)