Four Bears in the Bed

When I think of older siblings regressing in advance of an impending newborn (yes, this again), I imagine them asking to be carried, fed, dressed, and allowed to communicate in a series of goo-goos and ga-gas even though none of the above has been necessary for many months or years. I can hear their little voices tweaking out “I’m the baby!” and I can see their still chubby knees flushing with pink after a semi-convincing performance of infant crawling technique across the floor.

Wombat’s regression move of choice is not so typical or innocent as all that. He prefers to hide under my dress. In my dress. While I’m wearing it. As in, head all up in my ladybusiness, which is (a) all the more awkward because, at 3.5 years old, he’s exactly crotch height, and (b) all the more uncomfortable because El Mompth is 38 weeks cooked and HEAVY and the cause of some, uh, tenderness in the netherness, meaning I don’t need a spastic preschooler flailing around that close to the Danger Zone. I should never have allowed myself to follow Freud down the rabbithole and imagine that this was Wombat’s way of regressing—it’s clearly a dramatization of his wanting to get back in through the out hole, ja?—but I did and it’s done and now it’s all I can think about.

Ignoring whatever Oedipal implications may be at play here, though, and aside from the fact that Wombat tells everyone at daycare what color my panties are (“Mite! Okaasan pantsu kiiro!”; I don’t know Japanese, but I KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS, CHILD), it’s just not that fun having a kid up your skirt, you dig? This is where I’d advise someone in a similar situation to “Wear pants, duh,” but listen: Pants ain’t happening. Pants are not a part of Plans A through Z. Pants forsook me, and so I have forsaken pants. And yet…in some moments pants seem like the only solution to keeping my younger child in and my older child out. I am heaving the heaviest of heavy sighs.

Anyway, after a few weeks of “ha ha, that’s cute, now stop it,” I’m now firmly committed to being a hardass about the skirt-as-tent thing. I’m instituting a lock-down from the top down. ’Scool, though, since I’m happily indulging his other requests, including to snuggle into bed next to me when he wakes up early (even though there is NO ROOM with Simon and me and Mompth and the body pillow and two extra-clingy cats) and also to be carried for short stretches when he insists he’s “not a very good walker” and reaches up his arms to me the way he did when he really wasn’t a very good walker.

Last night we went on a tour of our hospital’s labor and delivery ward, and the second-best part was holding Wombat up against the window so he could watch a brand new baby boy get his diaper changed in the nursery. “Awwwww! Isn’t he so cute!” Wombat cooed, and “Awwwww! We totally have to have another kid after this one” I heard murmur from the hearts of all the first-time mothers on the tour.

Now, it’s no easy task to hold/carry 35 pounds of kid on top of (literally on top of) 40 pounds of baby weight, but aside from it being necessary for either Simon or I to keep him out of reach of all the hospital equipment (we hear beep beep, beep beep, but kids hear touch me! touch me!), I really don’t mind carrying him when I’m able because that’s one tangible way I can express how so very proud I am—for lack of a more accurate word—to be the mother of these two boys. Holding him up to see someone else’s new baby boy in the nursery was more than adequate payoff for the back and hip and vag pain I suffered for the rest of the night as a result.

I’m especially proud for having been brave and/or temporarily insane enough to be giving this second boy to the first, because as jazzed as I am to welcome a new person into the family, I’m more excited for Wombat than for any of the rest of us (except for maybe Mompth himself, whose muffled refrain these days is surely “I’m crowded! Roll over!”) I’m nervous about what a new baby will do to our routine and our relative freedom, but I’m shocked to report that I’m not (yet?) feeling protective of my relationship with my firstborn. As a person who is ever on the precipice of tumbling into bottomless nostalgia—the type of person who mourns the passing of an era while that era is still happening—I can’t believe I haven’t become overwhelmed with grief about the end of Wombat’s singlehood, about our time together as special pals who don’t have to share our mother-son relationship with anyone else. “You’re my favorite little guy,” Simon tells him at least once a day, but now “And when Mompth is here, I’ll have two favorite little guys.” (Damn it. I’m writing about how cool and unaffected I am by the coming change, but now I’m making myself cry about it…)

Still, although when it comes to adding another person to my life I’m a mix of every good and bad emotion there is, the remaining fact is that inflicting (inflicting!) a sibling on Wombat feels like 100 percent the awesome thing to do. He’s going to be such a great brother, you guys. As his parent, it’s not my job to be his friend, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make one for him.

So we all rolled over and, fingers crossed, no one fell out. All of us in the bed and the little one said (or will say, eventually), “Ah-goo,” and the hearts of his three adoring onlookers—Mama, Daddy, and his best big brother friend—explode in a burst of rainbow confetti and we are crowded but, oh, so happy happy happy.