Cold coffee.
It’s 1pm and I’m still in last night’s pyjamas which are actually yesterday’s loungewear. Or, rather, would be yesterday’s loungewear if not for the multiple shirt changes that overnight pee-ventures and spit up required.
It’s 1pm and the child is finally sleeping in his cot, half-size-too-big kimono shirt tucked under his swaddle because I miscalculated how soon I’d need to do laundry and he was completely out of any onesies that actually fit the way they’re supposed to. This is probably the point that I should confess that I leaned too hard into the idea of “just enough” minimalism and didn’t order enough onesies in the not-quite-newborn-not-quite-infant size while our mail service was still running for anything other than absolute necessities like the medicine people need and can’t get on the economy. What exactly would make a couple more onesies a necessity?
I probably could order more without breaking the spirt of the “essentials only” guidance but there’s no guarantee that, with the abnormal routing our mail from the States is taking these days, they’d even get here before he’s already into the next size up.
And I could certainly take the neighbor up on her gracious offer—extended in an introduction & congratulations letter tucked into our mailbox the other day—to loan us anything we might need that her daughter has outgrown. Maybe I could swallow the feelings of awkwardness mixed with shame that I’m not more prepared and take her up on her offer. Or maybe I could just wait for the package to arrive from the Netherlands with the couple of onesies we ordered the other day from babydump. (I know what the right answer to this is. And it’s on me to not let me stubborn self-reliance get the best of me.)
This is probably the point where I should make my real confession: last night I put the child in his cot while he was screaming bloody murder for what felt like the 56th minute in a row and I went into another room and sobbed. Because, in that moment and for the about the gazillionith moment of yesterday or maybe it was today already, I felt like I was flailing.
Dealing with a newborn who will officially be an infant in a few days is not the hardest thing I’ve ever done. (No, that honor will always go to getting sober.) But it’s damn close.
I’m tired. Joe too. And I’m pretty sure the kid—who’s now making contented sleeping sounds in the cot next to me—is the most tired of us all.
We are so effing exhausted.
It’s 1pm and I’m wondering where the line is between “newborns are hard” and newborns in the time of Coronaville are even harder. Am I really facing anything more difficult than the average parent faces as a child sorts day from night and tries to adjust to being human? Is it really that much more difficult because we’re in confinement and cut off from just about everything and everyone? Exactly how much grace should I allow myself before compassion becomes self-pity?
And do I celebrate or lament the fact that—like millions of mothers (and fathers) before and alongside me—I joined the cold coffee club this morning as I struggled to get lukewarm gulps down between burps and bounces?
They say the years will be short, but all I can think about right now is how these days and nights are so very, very long...
