Everybody Needs a Bosom for a Pillow

I had to get out Your Baby’s First Year: Milestones and Common Sense and Such (not its actual title) last week when I realized I have no idea what, if anything, Fox is supposed to be doing now. He turned three weeks old on Monday, so what are we talking, here: smiling? waving? semaphore? I suspected he wasn’t actually supposed to be doing much of anything, and so my real motive for turning to the thrilling world of outdated parenting literature was to see if it could tell me what I’m  supposed to be doing at this stage. You know, “enrichment” stuff beyond the basic Feed It, Change Its Diapers, Dress It Up All Cute-type responsibilities, which I’m happy to report I’m ACING, like a mutha-mother. For real, my baby is almost always fed, changed, and cute! It’s almost like I’ve done this before.

Which is part of the problem.

See, having done this before, I’m so much more relaxed about general baby care that I worry I’m not doing enough. With Wombat, for the first several months I was constantly in his face, “stimulating” his “brain,” and it wasn’t until he became mobile that I realized how much time I had wasted crinkling crinkle books at the proper 8- to 12-inch distance from his new eyes when I should have been doing something more productive before he found his legs and actually needed constant supervision lest he pull the whole house down on his soft little noggin. I also realize now that a lot of what we do in those first months isn’t crucial to baby’s development but more geared toward forming healthy habits (e.g., reading to your kid) and forging a healthy parent-child bond. Once you have that stuff under control, it probably matters less how much time you spend gazing into your newborn’s eyes while explaining why this part of this song is Freddie Mercury’s finest moment, instead of, say, using those hours to weed the garden while the baby sleeps in his car seat in the shade. I mean, it’s not that babies don’t need attentive parental book crinkling when they’re still newborns (they don’t learn semaphore on their own, after all), but I’m pretty sure they don’t need constant attention during their waking hours at this age (not to mention all the attention they get when they’re sleeping just by virtue of their being so sweet and fat and quiet and angelic while unconscious). It really is okay to lay a happy, awake baby on the playmat and answer some emails. It really is. They can sleep somewhere besides in your arms.

I guess part of it comes from having an older child and having to work so hard to parent that stage of person. Wombat needs way more engaged attention and way more detailed explanations about Freddie Mercury and the planet Mercury and what’s gravity and why does not having any cupcakes in the house necessarily mean he can’t have cupcakes for dinner RIGHT NOW? With that in mind, it’s not really hard to see why I’m quick to take advantage of all the leeway a newborn allows. I’m merely taking advantage of the prime slacking months now that I’m aware they exist.

And so, heeding my own advice not to spend my entire maternity leave rapid-fire “a-goo”ing at my blob baby all the live-long day, the difference this time around is that it’s much easier, for instance, to let Fox sit in his bouncer in the kitchen while I do dishes with my back to him, which sounds both wonderfully sane and practical and also, thanks to cultural mores and goddamn hormones, wholly neglectful, not to mention hard evidence of a terrible lack of insight into how very, very short and fast these newborn days are because, my god, woman, you don’t spend all those months “engaging” with your baby for his sake, you do it for your own because before you know it he’ll be talking in complex compound sentences while picking out his own pajamas to take to a sleepover, during which he will miss you not even a little bit whereas you, on the other hand, will drop him off and then sit in the car for a full five minutes clutching your heart, remembering how warm and soft it felt when his head rested there not too long ago while you typed a blog post and he was three weeks old and you had to stop suddenly because the tears made it hard to see anything past your chest as the pillow for his tiny face, which is still yours, all yours, although just for now.