In Over My Head

I visited my friend, SJ, yesterday. I haven’t seen her or her husband since my wedding a year ago, and since then, she has given birth to a second daughter who is already 3-months old somehow. I wanted to meet her and catch up with my friend. I also secretly hoped I would leave their home feeling inspired and excited about starting our own bustling family.

Instead I drove away with an amalgamated feeling of uncertainty and trepidation. The entire time I was there, SJ had that dazed-mother look on her face. You know the look. It’s the look parents unconsciously assume when they are just trying to survive the chaos and unharnessed energy that surrounds them. They are talking to you and responding to their children, but in the back of their mind they’re thinking, “I would kill for a martini right now.” I’m pretty sure I had that look on my face, too by the time I left. The difference is that I was able to come home and actually have a martini. Or two.

Don’t get me wrong, their house is lovely, her husband is wonderful and her kids are amazing! They are beyond adorable and very well-behaved. The two year old is quite bright and her spirit is infectious (much like her mother’s), and the baby hardly fussed at all. At least she surpassed my expectations of how a three-month old should behave. 

Nevertheless, both kids need to be fed multiple times a day, everyday, and bathed and dressed and entertained and coddled and soothed and it’s constant and there’s never a moment’s rest and I’m really not sure I can do it--at least not without losing my mind or having a major mommy meltdown.

Maybe it was the fact that I had stumbled into a two-kids-under-two household environment. Maybe I should play it safe for now and only visit friends with one child…learn to swim in the shallow end before diving into waters that are well over my head.

The good news is: I was pretty good with the kids. I kept up with the toddler’s TADD (Toy Attention Deficit Disorder).  And, I actually managed to keep the baby from crying by holding her and bouncing her, and I received a wonderful arm workout to boot. At least I can look forward to having nice biceps again someday.

After lunch, the two-year year old announced that she had to poop. Her mother led her to the bathroom where she sat on her miniature pink toilette for fifteen minutes and exclaimed every time she successfully squeezed a doodie into the bowl. I haven’t seen someone take that much pride in their poo since a guy in my freshman dorm left an enormous floater in the bowl for all to appreciate. It was quite moving actually.

Meanwhile, I was shuffling around the living room trying to burp the baby, when all of a sudden, she upped this enormous milky white gob of spittle. It oozed out of her tiny baby lips leaving a snail's-trail of saliva its wake and poured onto the towel protecting my shoulder. A delicate whiff of the partially digested milky substance entered my nostrils and it happened: I gagged. I gagged a few times, actually. Tears filled my eyes and I had to put the baby in her rocker before my spasms caused me to drop her. All I could think about was the fact that this liquid had recently been in my friend breasts, passed through her nipples, traveled down the baby’s throat into her nascent stomach before retracing half its journey and finally settling on my left shoulder.

Fortunately there was no one around to witnesses my embarrassingly weak reflexes, as both mother and sister were appropriately distracted in the nearby bathroom.

How humiliating. My friend Debbie swears this won’t happen with my own child. I'm hoping she's assuring me that my baby won’t burp or spittle or slobber or drool or any of these disgusting things that other uncivilized babies do, but somehow I don’t think that’s what she meant.