It's around 6am and I'm bleary-eyed at my computer, nursing Veronica. It's quiet and cool outside, the silvery-blue sky like an umbrella over our little neighborhood. Greg is asleep in the bed and the cats are milling around on the deck.
Veronica has been going through a bit of a transition the last few days -- just spending more time awake and alert and less time, obviously, sleeping. It's taken its toll on both me and Greg, driving me in particular to a teary frustration on more than once occasion. But even as we move through this new phase we continue to improve in our infant care-taking skills.
Last night, as I gave up a trip to Walgreens, literally setting down my half-full basket in the middle of an aisle so that I could walk out of the store with my crying daughter, I realized that the only thing I can do is just let go. So I don't get the things I need at Walgreens, even after I crammed myself into their bathroom with the stoller so that I could change her poopy-diaper. So I have to sit on a bench in the square to nurse her for 45 minutes. So I have to walk down Lincoln Avenue with her shrieking inside the Moby wrap. I just have to let go.
Greg talked to his mom last night who is concerned that he and I are so stressed out right now. She said that she doesn't remember crying when she had her first son. I thought about this while I made dinner last night. It didn't make me feel bad to hear those things. I think we're justified in feeling stressed out and I also recognize that I hang a little higher on the crying scale than some women.
But I was thinking about how different my generation is than our parent's. Greg and I are coming off of a decade of self-indulgence. We're coming off of 10 years of selfishly doing anything we want for ourselves and now, with Veronica in our lives, we're suddenly finding ourselves forced to let go of fancy media dinners, cocktail parties, trips to exotic locales, and even simpler things like going to the movies or buying an expensive pair of shoes -- all things that our parent's generation weren't used to doing in the first place.
It makes sense to me that this will be an adjustment period. Last night as I set down my basket at Walgreens, that quick teary-frustration rising up through me, I paused for a second, and instead of letting myself dissolve along with Veronica, I just let go. Oh well, I thought, no Walgreens tonight. And no sense crying over it. And once I let go, it was an immediate relief. And a reminder that it's something I need to get better at in general...letting go.
Besides, once you let go, all the things you stop expecting become so much sweeter when you actually get them. We were able to put a very asleep Veronica into her bassinet last night (for the first time ever) and for an hour, Greg and I got to sleep in each other's arms. It was blissful and even better than I remember.
