Image courtesy of sxc.hu user bmcent1
Okay, okay, I know it's been a while since the last pearl. What can I say? Life gets busy...which brings me to a new thought.
I have a very distinct memory from when Luke was a little baby. I'd been in that postnatal fog, where I felt like couldn't do anything or get anything done. Not that I was experiencing postpartum depression or anything - it was just that making dinner seemed like an insurmountable task. Marty would come home and look at the piles of dishes and laundry, etc. and be like, "So...what did you do today?" And I would just kind of shake my head and be like, "Um, I don't know. I held the baby. I kissed him, like, a thousand times." Anyway, sometime amid this fog, Marty and I were crawling exhaustedly into bed and I reached under the pillow and found...a diaper. A dirty diaper. Not a poopy one, but definitely one that had been used. I remember looking at him and saying, "When we were dating, I didn't think this is what it would come to." The real question I was asking was, "When are we going to get back to normal?" And the answer I've come up with (albeit a year and a half later) is that we're not.
I think that no matter which phase of life you're in with your kids, there is no "getting back to normal" - there's only adjusting and figuring out what the "new normal" is. And I think a big part of embracing your "new normal" involves actively trying to forget some of the parts of your life that came before in favor of finding joy in the new parts. I've pretty much forgotten what it was like to sleep in on Saturday mornings then not worry about what anyone felt like eating until noon or so. But there's joy in the new normal of groggily going to get Luke, then letting him watch cartoons in bed with us while we doze in and out for 20 minutes, before getting up to make pancakes. At 7:15 on a Saturday morning, of course, but still...
There are seminal moments in your life that stick with you forever. The birth mornings and afternoons of my four children are definitely among those. I can recall just about everything involved in every sensory mode.
A true seminal moment was the realization that although Dan and I had these grandiose plans about how the addition of a baby wouldn't change things that much, Molly meant the new normal had arrived.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating what was a typical Friday night dinner--tuna garbage (most families have a variation of same: open can of tuna, add whatever, eat hot or cold). Dan was in his spot, I was in mine. He was drinking a glass of milk, I had a Diet Pepsi. "Name That Tune" was the 6:30 p.m. game show on television. I had changed into comfy clothes from whatever else I had been wearing that day. I was exhausted, the type of exhaustion that accompanied teaching high school kids and coaching volleyball after school all week, a familiar sensation slowly being replaced with the thought that this was TGIF, tomorrow was Saturday, I could sleep in.
And then from her spot in her bouncy chair on the floor, 8 day old Molly began to cry.
It was as if someone literally poured a bucket of cold water on my head. I wasn't exhausted because I had been at school all week. I was running on fumes because I had spent the week learning myself, learning how to be a mother, and the learning was only beginning and Molly wasn't going anywhere, she didn't get on the school bus and go home on Friday afternoon, she was here for THE REST OF MY LIFE and I couldn't sleep in on Saturday morning, in fact, I couldn't sleep through the night!
Thirty two years, three more children and a delightful daughter-in-law later (Tom...Toby's wife, Kitty, who has not requested an alias for this blog), what a fabulous, amazing, unpredictable ride it's been. Even as an empty nest-er, I'm waiting for it to become normal--and I have to say, I'm kind of glad it hasn't.
So when have you hit a new normal? How did you deal with it? Have you forgotten parts of your old life, or have you managed to incorporate them into your new life? Leave us a comment, or take our survey now.
A true seminal moment was the realization that although Dan and I had these grandiose plans about how the addition of a baby wouldn't change things that much, Molly meant the new normal had arrived.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, eating what was a typical Friday night dinner--tuna garbage (most families have a variation of same: open can of tuna, add whatever, eat hot or cold). Dan was in his spot, I was in mine. He was drinking a glass of milk, I had a Diet Pepsi. "Name That Tune" was the 6:30 p.m. game show on television. I had changed into comfy clothes from whatever else I had been wearing that day. I was exhausted, the type of exhaustion that accompanied teaching high school kids and coaching volleyball after school all week, a familiar sensation slowly being replaced with the thought that this was TGIF, tomorrow was Saturday, I could sleep in.
And then from her spot in her bouncy chair on the floor, 8 day old Molly began to cry.
It was as if someone literally poured a bucket of cold water on my head. I wasn't exhausted because I had been at school all week. I was running on fumes because I had spent the week learning myself, learning how to be a mother, and the learning was only beginning and Molly wasn't going anywhere, she didn't get on the school bus and go home on Friday afternoon, she was here for THE REST OF MY LIFE and I couldn't sleep in on Saturday morning, in fact, I couldn't sleep through the night!
Thirty two years, three more children and a delightful daughter-in-law later (Tom...Toby's wife, Kitty, who has not requested an alias for this blog), what a fabulous, amazing, unpredictable ride it's been. Even as an empty nest-er, I'm waiting for it to become normal--and I have to say, I'm kind of glad it hasn't.
So when have you hit a new normal? How did you deal with it? Have you forgotten parts of your old life, or have you managed to incorporate them into your new life? Leave us a comment, or take our survey now.
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