Hard Work

Thanks to you all for being patient with me while my focus is on Jackson and not, oh say, blogging. I promise I'll be back at some point. He'll be five weeks old tomorrow so every day we get a little closer to the time that parenthood is a little less intense. (No, I'm not naive enough to think that parenthood will ever be simple or easy but, from what I hear, this period is definitely the toughest. Until the teens, of course.)

That said, tonight I am absolutely amazed at how humbling parenting is. In the long run, it's not necessarily a bad thing but it's hard in the meantime. It seems to be chipping away at so many of the ugly parts of me. I can't be a control freak and be a mommy of a newborn. I can't be a perfectionist. I can't rely on my own abilities.

The biggest hit seems to be that old pride problem. I want so desperately to have a perfect child, a child that other people will look at and say, "Wow, they're doing a great job!" I want everything I attempt to be successful--after all, generally in life I succeed at most everything I try. I want (and I wince as I type this but I'm just going to be honest here) to be able to look down my nose at people with screaming babies, with misbehaving babies, with anything but perfect babies.

And that's just not going to happen.

Instead, I fret and cry and pull my hair out and make mistakes and obsessively Google solutions and some days just feel like quitting.

But I hear that's all quite normal. So in the in between times, I'm trying to remind myself that like so many other unpleasant things I have endured for Jackson's sake, this is good for him. It's making me into a better mommy and a better person.

Now I just have to remind myself to read this post in the tough times.