SOMETHING BETTER

Twenty years ago, my second baby, H, was born. Two weeks later, I began the long learning journey of realizing that my children are not an extension of myself. They are their own separate beings, and I simply get to love, teach, guide, and do a whole lot of growing alongside them.

It started with colic every evening. Did I call it colic? No, because my kids were perfect and good! She just…cried for several hours. Then came the inconsolable daytime crying unless I was a human pacifier. I remember sitting at my kitchen table, eating leftover lasagna while waiting on hold with the pediatrician’s office to figure out what could be wrong with my baby. The nurse got on the line and we went through the typical list. Then she paused and asked, “Have you eaten anything with red sauce?” I looked down at my forkful of lasagna – red sauce was my staple! Enter in a new diet: no spices of any kind other than salt, no salad dressing, no chocolate or broccoli and certainly no red sauce! It wasn’t until sixteen years later that we learned how distressed her poor guts were.

H stopped crying (unless I ate something that caused her grief), but she got older and started to move! We went to a family reunion when she was six months old. There were three other babies, all close to the same age. After a while I noticed that family members all wanted to take turns holding the babies, but people were not asking to hold H. Why? Because H didn’t sit on your lap, she climbed you and wiggled and never held still! It was a workout just to hold her.

At seven months, I took her for a check-up and the doctor asked how she was sleeping at night. I told him that she was up once every hour and he looked at me sternly and said, “You know better.” I did. Bless you, Dr. Johnson. Sleep training saved my sanity. So did a little bit of validation. I spent at least a year telling myself how great my life and pretending that everything was fine, even though it wasn’t, and then I had a friend say to me “H was a hard baby.” She HAD been a hard baby, but that was the first time that I had heard anyone else say it or allowed myself to think it! Having a hard baby didn’t define me, it wasn’t a result of anything that I had done, it was just a fact – I had a hard baby.

When I was nursing H, my allergies got really bad, but since my milk dried up when I took antihistamines with C, I decided to tough it out. It was so bad that I would roll over in bed at night and could hear the fluid moving in my ears. It turns out that took quite a toll on my body – when H was 11 months old, I started suffering immense fatigue and shortness of breath. After several months of lethargy and lots of doctor’s appointments, I was diagnosed with asthma. In the meantime, H started walking, and running, and she didn’t stop! I would lay on the couch during the day and watch her run circles around the furniture.

H was only one when she had ideas of what she would wear and what she would not. She had a favorite striped sweater that she’d pull out of her drawer anytime it was clean and put away. The brighter the colors, the better! This was a child who knew her own mind.

Do you know the nursery rhyme that says:

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very very good
But when she was bad
She was horrid.

That was our H. She could put on the charm and smile and look angelic, and she could be a holy terror. Incidentally, even though her little towhead was full of straight hair, she did have this one little lock of hair that rebelled and would curl up – right in the middle of her forehead! Of course there were sweet times and tender moments, but this girl stretched me. She was so different from my idea of what my children and motherhood would be like, and unlike her sister, she was not compliant! (That ended up being a good thing, but that is a story for another post).

H was a TEASE. This was something that I could not understand. My husband knows from personal experience that being an imp comes naturally, but I just did not get it. Neither did older sister, C. Oh, there were tears. When H was about eight, I remember making a deal with her – if she would not tease her older sister for one day, I would sew a jacket for her American Girl doll. Just like that, she was an angel – for one day.

H is very artistic, and she drew the cutest stick figures full of personality. When she was eleven, she wanted to create a business using her artwork to make greeting cards. My attempts to help her were a pretty big fail – I was a tired, busy mom with lots of tiny people at home and no clue how to help her, but I did try. She was a good sport about losing money on that venture.

Somewhere in her teen years, her crazy drive and energy turned into productivity. I never had to ask her about getting her schoolwork done. She hunted down scholarships on her own. She got a job at age 15 and spent her summers working full-time starting at age 16. She took an entrepreneurship class in high school and was thrilled to come up with a business design. Want to know the good kind of mom that I am? When she told me about it, my comment was, “you’re not actually going to start it, right?” She did, all on her own this time, and got quite a bit of local and even national attention for it.

She was still keeping me busy, but in new ways. It was driving her to activities, work, and attending award ceremonies. It was hearing about all of her passions - everything from capybaras to the Royal Family. It took years of exhaustion, exasperation, and prayer. I learned so much about myself, my limits, and my whole paradigm of motherhood changed, but along the way she became one of my very best friends, and I would not be who I am today without the influence of this very special daughter. Twenty years ago I didn’t get what I wanted - I got something infinitely better.