I always wanted to be a mom. Motherhood figured prominently in every dream of my future. I was writing baby names in my notebooks before the age of ten. What can I say? I was a planner. My first child arrived, if not precisely in the month and season I had hoped (yes, I was very specific planner), right on schedule. Baby? Check. Bugaboo? Check. Birth announcements addressed and mailed? Check.
I am sure you know where this is going. We make plans, and our children laugh (or cry). Early motherhood for me vacillated between “It’s not what I expected” to “What the heck did I expect?”
I expected breast milk that flowed like a river, lazy meandering walks with a sleeping babe in the stroller, and lots of cooing (both my own and that of the imagined child). Instead, I got breast milk that sometimes hosed the sputtering baby in the face and often froze up in the face of a pump lest I want to leave the house or sleep through a feeding. I got hurried walks down the bumpiest cobblestone streets that would jiggle a colicky baby to blessed sleep. And I got lots and lots of crying (yes, both of us cried a lot).
At close to three months, my daughter had not yet laughed as What to Expect in the First Year told me she should have and I was all in tizzy. My father was visiting for the weekend and finally got a low-pitched and repetitive “he-he” out of her (not unlike Beavis and Butthead) while swinging her arms to a fast-paced Billy Joel song. As I watched her sweet, chubby little face after I had dutifully recorded the milestone in her baby book, I wondered about my own missing laughter.
Had I left my sense of humor at the hospital with the placenta? I resolved to get it back (the sense of humor, not the placenta), to live in the moment and celebrate the absurdity of life as a mother. I can’t say that I ever had a groove to get back but I certainly had a giggle to reclaim. I could make my friends and family laugh with a story or anecdote about the baby, but I wasn’t doing enough laughing myself. In addition to milestones, I started journaling the good, the bad, and the just plain ridiculous. These stories are much more interesting to go back to and reflect on than, say, head circumference at the 4-month checkup.
Parenting is no joke but it certainly can be funny. All the times our kids drive us crazy will likely be hilarious stories in 10 or 20 years. Why not start laughing now?
Lani Serota is the mother of two young girls, besotted wife, sleep aficionado (both her own and that of children), and celebrity child name enthusiast who loves a good giggle. When she is not working at one of her three jobs, taking advantage of everything New York City has to offer, or procrastinating, she loves to write.
