So the little one is 9 months old now, and I’m losing my mind. I forgot about this phase. This exhausting, exciting, annoying, joyful phase. He does something new everyday! Usually it involves a new way he can get into something or fall and injure himself.  I don’t want to wish time away, but I am already pretty tired of having to follow him around with my hands out. I’ve fantasized about wrapping him in bubble wrap and sitting down comfortably for a few minutes, maybe even in a chair instead of on the floor, since sitting in front of furniture is a good way to block it using my body without much extra effort on my part. 

Couple of things here. This is my second child. It feels so much worse this time for some reason, probably because the older one is constantly saying, “Mom, watch this!” while he throws a balloon into the air for the 947th time in a row, pulling my attention away from the crawler the exact moment he decides to pull himself up using a cabinet knob, which then opens the cabinet, causing him to fall backwards and bonk his head on the hardwood. Again. 

Why don’t you baby-proof, you might say? Yes. You’re right. Husband and I have, at the end of yet another day in quarantine, looked at each other a number of times and said, we should get those thingies that keep cabinets from opening. Maybe tomorrow. We did dig out of the basement our moveable playpen to act as a guard at the bottom of the stairs, so at least he can’t crawl up the stairs. It just feels like we’re always here in this house, but there’s never enough time to change or fix or babyproof anything. 

The other thing I’m aware of is how blatantly whiney I sound right now. I know there are so many people with two and more kids who make it work beautifully, and there are also people with one kid who are probably doing everything more mindfully and thoughtfully than we did with our first one. That’s part of the problem. I feel like I’m failing so hard on this when I’ve already done it once. I just completely forgot. They say that moms forget and only remember the good parts or whatever. I used to think that our moms didn’t tell us how horrible it was to have babies so that we would still give them grandchildren. Now I know the truth. If I wasn’t writing this down, I would absolutely have forgotten again, just like I forgot about how bad the first week home is and forgot that the newborn phase really seems to last forever while you’re in it though it seems like a flash once it’s over and forgot that breastfeeding is super hard. Oh wait, no I didn’t. I did not enjoy breastfeeding. 

I was thinking about how weird memory is today. I was thinking back on my life and what age I enjoyed the most, and I decided that my mid to late twenties were my favorite. I liked what I got to do and who I got to spend time with then. But then I thought more in-depth about that time and thought of some serious times of depression, like some real sadness that I thought would probably be a defining feature of that age for me, and I barely remembered it. I shocked myself a bit. 

This helped me come to the realization that this is again a temporary struggle. It feels so huge right now, but it will pass. Time will move forward, and the baby will start walking, which will bring new challenges, but it will hopefully involve less bending over and maybe less time holding him. Don’t look at me like that. He’s 23 pounds. He’s freaking heavy after a while. 

Someday I will miss holding him. I already have to steal snuggles from my 4 year old. Someday I’ll be old, and my kids will be adults, and though it’s super cliche, I will think back on this time wistfully, and I won’t remember the day-to-day struggles at all. I might even chastise myself for wishing them away so flippantly. This is the blessing and curse of aging, I imagine. Looking back, memory allows you to feel how you wanted to feel at the time but couldn’t because you were actually living the life you were building. 

With the blessing of this perspective, I’m going forward with a new attitude. As they say, time flies, and either fortunately or unfortunately, some of the cliches are real.