The perfect trilogy, performed first by Steven Tyler and the boys and now by me.

I prefer my words to be coming out rather than going back down. What I’m saying is, I don’t like it when I have to eat them. And there has been some substantial word-chewing over here these days. The Husband likes to laugh about the proclamations I made pre-baby, things like, “We’ll just drop his ass off at daycare” and “We’ll just drop his ass off with a baby-sitter.” Now I sob the whole way home from dropping his ass off at daycare, and when TH asks if I’m ready yet to leave him for a few hours and go to dinner and a movie, I just shake me head violently and hold The Kid as I curl into the fetal position, whispering “Nononononono,” over and over.

I am becoming something I never imagined I would be. I am becoming, it seems, a real live mother.

And like the rest of my life–when will I ever learn?–it looks completely different from what I envisioned. Fear has a way of darkening my doorstep no matter how many times I swore I’d vanquished it, like the villain in a bad horror movie who just. won’t. die. I wake up at night and imagine TK at daycare, helplessly lying on an activity mat as other snot-encrusted kids wobble around him, and I can’t go back to sleep. I think of bottles to be made, of clothes to be washed, of everything. Everything that fills our life now, turning up as specters in the night destroying my peace rather than light-filled blessings inspiring gratitude. This is what I do, what I guess we all do to some degree in our broken human condition, this ingratitude and faithlessness and fearfulness. This calling of good bad, this unholy renaming of story elements as complications rather than plot points, obstacles rather than inspirations. I am making life harder, and I want to stop. Especially now that it’s not just my life in the balance.

I did dentistry for the day yesterday, filling in at a local office, and I was pleased to see that reacquiring hand skills with a drill are, indeed, similar to riding a bike. (Then again, I’ve always been a little shaky on a bike.) I picked up the technique right where I’d left it a few months ago, but the day was different from the days then. When your heart has been invaded and ravaged and left open and raw, nothing looks the same. I called to check on him. I looked at his picture as I crept away every three hours to pump. I craved talks with The Husband, assurances that we are doing the right thing. Our circle of three gets stretched every day now as we’re in a trio of separate places, and it’s eating me alive. Not to be melodramatic or anything.

The Kid is doing just great, I should mention. He loves the activity mat and the buggy rides and the constant scenes to observe at daycare, and he sleeps just perfectly at night. It’s his mother who is a wreck, sobbing unpredictably like she just went through a bad breakup whenever a slow song comes on the radio or just…whenever.

There’s really no resolution here to end on, no pretty five-hundred-word bow to wrap up this post, and that’s what scares me sometimes: this is the rest of my life, this constant series of letting go, of releasing him into the wild of the world and trusting that the inevitable scars from it–and me–will make him, with redemption’s hand, into the person he’s meant to be. I wish it wasn’t so hard. I wish I was less emotional and more objective. Or do I?

The Yankee Mom handed me an envelope the last time she visited, photocopied pages of my favorite thing–words–and I sat down to read them recently. Their author is Meg Barnhouse, who, like YM, is a different kind of believer than I am but a believer nonetheless–a believer in something beyond herself, at least. She wrote of having her son:

Being a parent is not for the faint of heart…love is hard on the heart. Your heart can’t remain perfect and proud, unscarred and perky. It will be worn and joyous, wise and beat up, and full of sorrow and amazement. It will tremble with the awful knowledge of how helpless you are to keep him from pain, of how closely he will watch you to see what to become and what not to become. I would rather have this heart than the one I had before…

All this time I expected it to be easy. While it was meant to be…amazing.