Dear Self,
You are 12 days postpartum. Baby #3 entered this world with a bang, all 10 lbs 3 oz of him, a beautiful addition to the family and yet a disruption to the routine you had cultivated and embraced over the years. You struggle to find the equilibrium.
You are now the mother of three kids under 5 years old. You want to savor and soak up as much of the experience of temporarily staying home with your three little ones as you can, and to remember every detail of your last baby’s sweet cheeks, or the way he grunts like a baby animal when he stretches, or his propensity to tuck his tiny head in the crook of my neck. You’re already bemoaning the fact that he is growing rapidly, and when his bellybutton scab fell off today you wondered what was next–driver’s ed?
But amidst the time and dedication to growing a new baby on the outside of your body, you also want to cling to your own goals. You want to write.
So you steal moments here and there. You feel guilty that you could be reading to a kid or taking a nap or cleaning the house–something that surely sounds more “important” than your writing. But you had momentum, damn it, and you have dreams. So you plug away, little by little, trying to make it happen. Ten minutes here, sometimes five minutes there, and if you’re lucky thirty minutes or an hour, but those are infrequent gifts of time that depend on the synchronization of children’s nap schedules and baby moods and everything else going on in life at the moment.
Mothering new babies requires patience and flexibility, but for you, it is not going to require abandoning important goals. You are determined. Nobody said sharing a life with children required giving up everything.
And by baby #3, you are confident that your children will become better people seeing a mother who models going after her own dreams and taking action to move toward the goal.
Keep it up. Minute by minute, word by word, something will come of the forward motion. At least that’s what you hope.
Be kind to yourself.
Signed,
Your Observing Ego
Teresa Shimogawa 