Torin is four months old this week! Wow. I can't believe he was still inside four months and one week ago. Labor seems so long ago now, and it feels like it was another person, a free person with coherent trains of thought and endless capacity for productivity who slept at night and had time for things like getting a haircut who actually was pregnant, not me. Man, she did not know what she was in for! Anyway, that other person has been replaced by a new me. The Mommy Me!
Basically, I've realized lately that the oxytocin coursing through my veins from his birth has largely worn off by now, but sleep deprivation goes on and on, and add in the return to the real world of earning money and recalling those professional goals and aspirations,... and I am finally starting to understand a bit what the Mommy Job is going to be like.
Due to teething and a fast metabolism, Torin is back to sleeping not more than two to three hours at a time, EVER. And since he also is very firm about the fact that he doesn't like a bottle EVER, guess who else is also up every two to three hours around the clock? The little cutie also needs me to adhere to regular bed times and nap times every day! Schedules are not really my strong suit, but I comply, because the alternatiive is really not worth it. The Chief must be obeyed.
I now wake up for the day before seven am every morning. My natural sleeping hours are somewhere between 11 pm or so and 8 or 9 am. The 5 am to 8 am hours formerly being my most important sleep time. Not so anymore! I don't have a most important sleep time these days, because somebody else, somebody tiny who sleeps in my bed with me, now dictates everyone's sleep patterns in our house. And HE gets up at 6:30 every day.
I have started my script reading job again, which is wonderful because I can do it from home, but is terrible at the same time because I need to use my brain to do it, which doesn't work so great anymore. The Chief bounces in his chair and dozes or fusses or nurses or chews his hands and drools on my shoulder while I sit at the computer to work on them. He interrupts me regularly to do more important things like baby yoga and diaper changing, but I go back to them and eventually by sheer force of will and some editing help from my husband, (who despite his sleep deprivation can still spell), they get done.
And, to keep my heart happy, and to prepare for a couple of upcoming shows that I want to participate in, I need to find time to paint regularly again as well. For this I demand the luxury of someone else watching the chief for a few hours. And it is heavenly and over all too soon. No offense though, Torin, you will always come first now.
Then there is time spent eating, bathing, laundrying, bill paying, shopping, cleaning the house, e-mail, and some time stolen away for facebook and occasionally socializing as well, and on rare and ideal days I get to meditate or do some yoga....and there goes my life!
And now I see. There is NO WAY I am going to get to everything that needs doing in any given day, or week, or year. I must make choices. All the time make choices about what is important, what I can live without and what I can't. What I must do and what I can let slide. What I'm going to focus on and what I'm going to regret.
And meanwhile, this baby gets cuter and more fun everyday. How could I not want to spend every waking and sleeping moment focusing on him?
And I KNOW that I am a super lucky mom. I am SUPER lucky. I have a supportive, capable husband, we both largely work from home, and I have had nearly four months with few financial responsibilities in which to focus on Torin's early days. Torin himself is happy and healthy. I have a place to live, a car to drive, and God-willing enough money to keep having these things. I have good food to eat and am in relatively good health. I have friends and family, far flung though they may often be. And still, from my incredibly privileged position, this is one tough job.
Torin is perhaps the very most delightful job that I have ever had in my life though, and as challenging as this mommy thing is, I am so very happy to be doing it.
