Change The World March 24, 2014

It seemed doable. Help me get my first book in order. Keep the house clean. Send the book to a few publishers. Do the laundry. Get a book deal all lined up. Make dinner. Totally doable. Except it wasn’t.

This is what I had in mind when I first heard my forever mom would be home with my new little person and I for almost a whole 12 weeks after he was born. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s one of those things she apparently read about in all the baby books and blogs and online forums and neglected to tell anyone. Maybe because she hoped it wouldn’t be true. But it was.

Tomorrow is the 12-week anniversary of dear Carter’s birth. And while mom has done a pretty stellar job (at least in my opinion) of keeping the house in order during that time, anything beyond that has all but fallen by the wayside. That thing all her friends told her about never having time to so much as shower on a daily basis? Truth.

So you can imagine how far my plans for our book deal didn’t get. I may as well have added changing the world to the to-do list. Ultimately that’s what I want to do with my book after all. But now that mom is back to work and we are in transition, I realized today the biggest thing standing in the way of changing the world is ourselves.

I watch as mom holds herself to impossible standards. She is always trying to do everything (and then some). Trying to be everything to everyone. And when it’s all said and done, she ends up losing herself in a disarray of high expectations and disappointment. It’s a nightmare to watch. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live.

To me it seemed doable. But maybe that was my mistake. What do I know? I have two main jobs in life – love my people with all of my heart and soul and share my joy with the world. Everything else is taken care of for me. The same cannot be said of my people. They work hard. They have long lists of things to do that don’t always get done. It must be pretty normal for people to have this problem.

Except I can’t say it’s actually a problem when you know the solution. It’s tough for just one person to do it all. To change the world. But we, together, can change the world. We just have to work together. We just have to live. We just have to do it one paw print at a time. All forward motion counts.

Today’s post is dedicated to my dear friend HuntMode, who helped me see the light on this topic today.

Thank you, Huntie, for your friendship and love.

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When It Rains March 17, 2014

It started at 1:23 a.m. That is when baby Carter started crying (all right, more like screaming), almost an hour an a half before he usually wakes up hungry this morning. So mom and dad got up, fed him, and went back to bed. Mom wasn’t sleeping very well to begin with, so I snuggled my best. I’m not sure it mattered.

Then at 5:36 a.m. the phone calls and text messages started. My dear grandma, who was all set to babysit baby Carter on mom’s first day back to work, couldn’t come. She broke a tooth eating breakfast of all things, and needed to get in to see a dentist as soon as possible. Thank goodness for my aunt Morgan, who swooped in to save the day.

Though I’m not entirely sure she saved much other than Carter and I, since it was definitely one of those days for mom. The kind that never ends even though you wish you could just go to bed and have it be tomorrow. The polar opposite of the kind of days you savor. The kind that when it rains it pours. Because when she got back to work, she was greeted by far more than she expected. Far more than she would be capable of catching up on in a day (let alone a month or two). For some, this would be an easy enough mountain to climb. Slow and steady. For mom, who cares so very deeply for doing the right thing even if it hurts, it was like a punch to the stomach.

I know as well as anyone she hates to let people down, and that is exactly what she felt like from the moment she got to back to work. She was letting Carter (and me) down because she left. She was letting her clients down because she couldn’t take care of them all at once. Ultimately, she let herself down because of letting all of this get to her.

Meanwhile, I was home monitoring the Carter situation and he was not happy. It started again yesterday – after days (or maybe weeks?) of fairly decent behavior, he started crying inexplicably. All the time. Morgan rocked him and sang to him and fed him and changed him and dressed him and nothing seemed to work. If I didn’t know better, I would say he and mom are on some sort of level emotional playing field. The way she has been crying the last couple of days mirrors his cries in a way I can’t think is a coincidence.

But it ended at 9:08 p.m. Baby Carter finally fell asleep. And mom and dad breathed a collective sigh of relief. Because let’s be honest. Sometimes there are days like this. Days with very little (if any) silver lining. Days that just plain run us down. When it rains it pours. But at least I know one thing for sure. That rainbow always follows the storm.