Have Gun, Will Travel

Funny…I thought motherhood would change me.  Instead I kind of feel like I’m changing motherhood.  Not in some huge revolutionary way - like I should be on Oprah.  But just in my own small ways.  Like I change it for myself, I twist around my own ideas of motherhood, I redefine them and become them.  Like slipping into a hand-me-down and being inspired by its vintage.

Right now - as most days as Orion sleeps and I take a moment for myself in the quiet of our living room - where the afternoon light fills the spaces between my lips and fingers, I realize amazing things.  Like that I survived the “fourth trimester”.  My son will successfully be 3 months old this Thursday.  No longer a newborn, just temporarily an infant.  I’ve been ordered to enjoy this phase by strangers and family members alike.  How could I not?  How can I more?  Every smile and sigh and kick and surprisingly loud fart sends me into the heavens.  His father and I both are enamored with him.  Our greatest compliment.  To ourselves.  To each other… is gazing at our son, drinking in his sweet quiet innocence and committing these things to memory.  Then we kiss and Orion smiles.

I thought I might find it strange.  To go from being an underpaid writer in Brooklyn, to working in a high rise in Manhattan to being a housewife and mommy.  But as I ironed my husbands shirts last night, finding rhythm in the swish and hiss of the steam, I heard reaffirmation.  “See that Orion?  Mommy is ironing Daddy’s shirts because she loves him.”  I turned around to see my two guys.  My baby boy with his giant brown eyes, his gaze fixed on me, his smile puppeteered by my own.  My husband, who works hard for us, has always loved me fearlessly and has gone through fire with me since we’ve met.  I find myself at the edge of tears every other day.  Happiness. How could this not be my life’s work?

<3

I have never been so thirsty in all my life than I have these past several weeks.  When once tepid water would have gotten me by, lately it’s cold water - the colder the better - that I obsess over.  It used to be wine, or a nice stiff martini even (once upon a time when I drank dirty martinis with three olives).  Now…I dream of water.  A frosted, filled-to-the-brim cobalt blue glass sits beside me on the night table and remains in tact for less than 60 seconds before I’ve devoured it.  And only another minute or five will pass before I’m up again, waddling to the kitchen to refill my barren chalice with life giving, ethereal water.

Then I break out to the bathroom for the 20th time since bed.  I grip my tummy, apologizing to little him as he bunches himself up inside me, distancing himself from my bladder.  I can already tell he will have my tendency to be particular and self-protecting.  

You would think I might learn not to gobble down glass after glass of water if I want to sleep through the night without so many bathroom breaks.  But this is my existence now.  I’m a night dweller.  Simply existing in the bathroom or the kitchen (lit by the open fridge as I pour another glass) with small instances of sleep in between.  Practice for my prince I suppose.  Who needs sleep anyway?

I’ve lived in this place before.  This is one of those temporary limbos where all I can do is wait.  I cling to habits that bring me some sense of repetition.  So maybe I can convince myself that days aren’t passing at all.  Or that the same day is simply playing over again in a non-stop reel like a broken slide projector.  Like after Grandma died and I existed in Texas, alone, surviving on wine and Chinese delivery food and cigarettes and refused company because I’d have to clean up for company and look presentable.  In a few weeks this limbo will just be the few weeks before everything changed and I’ll remember them with a fondness and a humor.  As for now, at this moment - I’m just tired like a zombie and so very fucking thirsty.