Alert the presses, people, I made bread. For sure it is of the 5-minutes-a-day, rise-it-in-the-fridge-and-never-knead-it variety, but still. Bread. And the house smelled wonderful. And The Teenager inhaled it, which was the main point of making it. And it is a beginning.
It is good to know that all of my pre-baby imaginings were not entirely bunk.
When I was still pregnant, before I could quite imagine what being a mother was going to be like, I fantasized about how I was going to cook big healthy meals for my family with homemade bread and vegetables I grew, and eggs from our chickens. I was going to knit beautiful things from yarn that maybe I spun. I was going to sew clothes for me and my baby and keep a beautiful, clean, sunlit home that my boyfriend was going to be so happy to come home to.
I don't know where I thought the baby was going to be while I was doing all this. Maybe in a baby carrier? It was like I thought I was going to magically turn into Edward Espe Brown or Amanda Soule magically upon becoming a mother. And also that I would be rested. Instead, I encountered the newborn effect. What is that? It looks like this:
And like this:
And like this:
I spend the better part of each day on the couch either nursing or holding a sleeping baby. I sleep 5 or 6 hours each night, in 3 hour stretches if I'm lucky. I have a baby on my body roughly 20 hours each day. She doesn't much like the various carriers I've tried, which means I have one free hand at best. I can barely fed myself, let alone the rest of the household.
I'm not complaining. Even if I'm only feeding one person, that's my most important job. And there is nothing sweeter than a milk-drunk, sleeping baby on my chest. And she will only be this tiny and need me this much for a little while. And so I am catching up on my reading and watching movies and enjoying the way the light changes in the room and thinking about whatever thoughts wander through my head. The bread and the sewing will wait.
And although the house feels a bit like it is falling apart around me, my boyfriend still loves coming home to us.
Last Thursday, at two minutes before midnight, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.
This Thursday, I marvel that this little person has been in my life for only one week, both because I can't imagine life before her, and because these 7 days have flown by in an instant. I also marvel that I made something so incredible with my own body. The miracle of life is miraculous indeed.
