When Eli was just 4 weeks old, I brought him to a new moms' support group that was meeting at a local library. It was early September, and any other year I would have been commuting to school, shuffling my lesson plans and straightening my classroom for the day ahead. Instead I fretted over Eli's outfit -- what were they supposed to wear when we went outside, again? -- and pushed his stroller down Queens Boulevard, wincing when he cried, leaning over him to push with one hand and use the other to hold the pacifier deeper in his mouth (take it, take it!). At the library, I wrestled with the door, sweating in my nursing top, feeling like I had just run a marathon.
There were gym mats spread out on the floor, and I dug Eli out of his carseat and laid him down in front of me, while the other moms did the same. Then, on my left, another mom strolled in with her baby in a carrier, plucked her out and sat her on the floor. "Sat her," because this baby could sit up. We must have all goggled in amazement, because the mom -- bright-eyed, because she was probably getting more sleep than us moms of newborns -- laughed.
"One day they'll sit up too!" she said, gesturing to our squirmy, wriggling infants. I felt this odd flash of despair. This was supposed to be a support group for new moms, I thought. Not this mom, with her smiling, sitting, teething baby, who had to be at least 6 months old. A mom to a 6-month-old wasn't a new mom. She was a totally experienced, been-there-done-that mom.
Of course, eventually I became a mom to a 6-month-old. By then I had figured some things out -- how to get the pacifier to stay in Eli's mouth -- but not others (2+ years in, I'm still flummoxed by the door/stroller maneuver). And by then I had found my own support group, and we talked about what moms of 6-month-olds talk about: teething, introducing solids, crawling. All of it was new to me -- because even though I was no longer the mom of a newborn, I had never been the mom of a 6-month-old before either.
When Eli was a baby, my Twitter profile said I was a "new mom." Sometime after he turned 1, I amended it to say "new(ish) mom." Now that he's 2, I caught myself wondering: Can I call myself a new mom anymore?
When does the statute of limitations on new motherhood expire?
Recently I was with Eli in a playground when he decided to live large in someone else's personal space. When he was a baby, he'd crawl over into some bigger kid's area and that kid's mom would say, "Be careful of the baby!" Only this time, Eli was the bigger kid, and the baby in question and his mother looked sort of aghast at the antics of my cavorting, stomping toddler. And I was the mom who had to say, "Be careful of the baby!"
And that's when I realized: I'm still a new mom. I've never been the mom to a toddler before. Sure, I can tell you which pacifiers to buy or how to choose between puffs and mum-mums. But by the time I figured all this stuff out, I didn't need to know it anymore. (And from what I gather from friends who are on their second kid, you either (a) forget it or (b) have a kid with such a radically different personality that it doesn't matter what you did with your first. So even on your second, you're still a new mom to that baby.)
Yesterday I was trying to calculate how old Eli would be when I turn 40, and I realized he'd be almost 11 years old. I shivered. Someday I will have a 10-year-old.
And I'll still be a new mom then, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment