The Real Thing

I feel a bit guilty confessing this, but sometimes it is difficult to love the real E, not the baby I thought she would be. Nine months of unconscious projection is a hard thing to reinvent at one go. I realize now that my idea of what a baby would be like was a hopeful amalgam of various impressions. I wanted her to be the soft thing couched in an orange cloth carrier on the chest of the woman next to me on the airplane, soundless during the entire trip. I wanted her to be the smiling infant in the strollers we passed during our walks. I wanted her to be the type of baby that makes other people want to have babies.

But that’s not always who she is right now. She cries going to sleep and cries waking up; she cries a bunch in between. She doesn’t conform easily to any type of schedule. She can be stubborn and gets fussy. She can’t be willed into being a certain way, which is oddly difficult after a pregnancy and labor that seemed almost too easily conformed to what I had hoped it would be.

I can be exhaustingly efficient, endlessly patient, unmovingly firm, and she will still be at times difficult, unpredictable, demanding. Sometimes that is difficult to accept, and the endlessness of it all, and the degree to which it has so suddenly changed our lives, can be overwhelming. In this way, being with her is unlike any other endeavor I’ve undertaken. It is unlike going into medicine, unlike getting married. It demands instant, blind unconditionality.

But I guess that’s the challenge, the calling. It’s not judging her, according to my own selfish standards or society’s standards. It’s not caring too much how other people see her. It’s literally laying aside my training, my old body, my sleep, to meet her needs. Motherhood in that sense does not come naturally. It is not something I can will myself into; I need God’s help as much as with anything else. Sometimes that is relieving to admit.