Pride and Potential

Honour your children, they suggested. Share how they make you proud.

Easy peasy, as Connor likes to say. (He stole my expression.)

He’s always up for anything involving construction paper and crayons.

“What are you good at?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate in his answer.

child with sign

I’m good at building LEGO.

He’s so good at LEGO it actually freaks me out a little bit. He’s going to be smarter than I am. He might be already. He’s good at a lot of things, but the confidence he gets from LEGO is a joy to see. He can do it well and he knows it. And I’m glad he knows it.

“What else are you good at?”

I thought his answer might be painting. (“I have paint all over my hands because I’m an artist like my dad,” he told me the other day.) Or baking. There are lots of things he could have chosen.

child with sign

I’m good at cleaning up my toys.

But he chose this. It’s his job and he does it (though he occasionally complains about it, and fair enough). But he does a darn good job of cleaning up his toys.

“What’s something about you that makes you really nice?” Last question.

child with sign

I help you change the baby.

He thought for a split second. Helping change the baby is not just something he likes to do, it’s something he does because he wants to be helpful. And I so admire that about him. He’s a really good big brother.

And then there’s the baby. What to say about the one I’ve only known for a couple of weeks but who has changed my worldview? If life is made up of a series of steps along a path leading us to who we are meant to be, he is a significant one in mine. In him lies so much potential.

newborn with sign

I’m brand new and full of potential.

Both for him and for me.

Grace in Small Things: #8

sleeping newborn

I need to write, but I’ve been choosing sleep.

I don’t know what to say anyway.

I need to write about Ethan’s birth, because I think it’s a story that needs to be shared. I need to write about this first week, because I need to make some sense of it. I need to remember all this by writing about it here, but that will have to wait.

For now, a gratitude list:

  1. Newborn smell.
  2. Little boys who have become big brothers and really, really like helping.
  3. Sisters who never fail to step up.
  4. Husbands who get it.
  5. Peri bottles. (What? Whoever invented these deserves an award.)

***

In other news, I’ve got a post up at Just.Be.Enough today. It’s about feeling like I’m not as much of a mom as those who take care of two kids on their own. I wrote it before Ethan was born and I’m not sure how I feel about this now, but it’s still something I’m pondering. Come read

It Matters

I am at home with a three-day old baby. He is small and beautiful and so very wanted.

I am in awe, but I look at him and wonder what this next year will bring to our family, because now I know.

I know it won’t always be easy.

I know sometimes it will be really, really hard.

Just below the surface there is a small amount of anxiety. A nagging what if? 

I will admit to being scared. To, perhaps, a small amount of paranoia. To the worry that as much as I know now, as much as I’m so much better prepared and informed, I may not be able to avoid it.

But I will admit to hope.

Postpartum depression hit me by surprise last time. I didn’t expect it. Didn’t recognize it. Didn’t get help soon enough. And I never, ever want to experience something like that again.

Nor do I wish that upon any other mother – whether she’s a first-time, second-time, or sixth-time mom. Whether she gave birth or adopted. Whether she’s okay but her partner isn’t.

So today, on my son’s third day of life, I’m supporting Strong Start Day.

I found Postpartum Progress when I really needed it, and the information on that site (and Katherine’s response to my grateful email) was one of the things that led me down the right path towards recovery. That community has been important to me in the time since, as I worked through a really rough time last year and throughout this last pregnancy. I know I will be back there reading (and writing) in the days and weeks and months to come as I navigate my way through new motherhood a second time.

But not every woman can do that. Some don’t have Internet access. Some won’t know it’s there. Some just won’t think it’s relevant to them, as I wouldn’t have in the early days of my struggle. So the goal this year is for Postpartum Progress Inc. — the non-profit that supports the site and postpartum depression awareness (and all other mental illnesses related to pregnancy and childbirth) — to take all that great online information and turn it into material women can get from their clinicians and health care providers when they need it.

And they will need it. Someone you know will need it. Does need it.

Please help if you can. Donate if you can. If you can’t then please share the message. We do this one day a year – today only – and it matters.

It really, really matters.

The Baby Formerly Known as Hector

He’s here!

Newborn baby boy

 

Ethan Riley Farr
Born 11:39 p.m.
October 2, 2012
5 lbs 6 oz
18 inches

 

We’re home now and doing well. More later.

Dishes

Mundane is normal. Normal is good.

It’s the normal things I stop doing when things aren’t going well. The dishes languish, rinsed but not clean. The clutter in the house adds to the clutter in my mind.

I like puttering. It gives me a chance to think and to reflect and to feel in control. But none of those things is appealing when things aren’t going well. I don’t want to think and so I leave the dishes, my sullied thoughts glomming onto the detritus of dinner.

Lately my dishes are clean.

Clean dishes are normal. And normal is good.

As you may have noticed from my recent silence here, my writing isn’t coming together much lately. Or maybe it’s that I’m choosing to play and to sleep instead of choosing to write. In any case, I got a bit stuck. So when Velvet Verbosity suggested I try the 100 word challenge, I scoffed. “I don’t have time to write 100 words,” I told her (with a nod to Mark Twain). And then I decided it was worth a shot. And this is what came out in response to the current prompt – Doing the dishes.

 

I’ve also got a (previously written) post up on Just.Be.Enough today. Do you feel bad about feeding your kids McDonald’s? Join me in my McShame.