Confessions of Imperfection

"Mom!" I heard fear in my daughter's voice as I unbuckled my middle kid. Suddenly my giggling baby was flying "wheee" toward me on a stolen tricycle across the OUAC parking lot and that's not all, a car had to brake for him. Later I knew I should have apologized and lavishly thanked the driver for taking care. In the moment I felt too embarrassed and incompetent to even make eye contact. I snatched up the baby (unhappy to relinquish the tricycle) and held him tight.

My daughter was supposed to be holding the baby's hand. But at six, she isn't responsible for a one-year-old in front of a toy store. The baby brother is strong, fast and capricious. From now on, he will always be the last one removed from the car.

Why is it that I take comfort in the fact that I'm not the only mama who suffers significant lapses in parenting finesse? Wouldn't it be better for children everywhere if I really was the only recurrently maladroit mother out there? Yet as I read "get born" facebook confessions of moms who left safety seats unbuckled, forgot to feed a toddler, spaced the daycare pickup, or can't remember children's birthdays at the doctor, I know we share a bond of imperfection. My neighbor's daughter drank cough syrup. A friend's son choked down coins and she had to recover them from subsequent diapers.

I once arrived at a MOPS meeting and discovered in the parking lot that I had only two kids with me and my week-old newborn was still at home, sleeping in his carrier just inside the door. Can anybody I know outdo that? I HOPE NOT, but I wouldn't doubt it. I'm tempted to scrutinize other moms when they're having a good day, convince myself they are always full of beauty, wisdom and eternal patience, and measure myself inadequate. I begin to fantasize that they never fall from grace and there must be something seriously wrong with me, living in such blatant humanity.

Those reminders that I'm not alone help curb the tendency to indulge in a classic guilt-ridden pity party probably involving excessive chocolate or corn chips. Well that and looking in my children's endlessly loving and forbearing faces. I really don't expect my middle son to harbor ill feelings about the preventable tantrum scar on his eyebrow, or the fact that his bike helmet is tough to fit on his misshapen skull forever flat on one side and pointy on top because I neglected to rotate his sleeping head in his first four months of life. No, he will forgive and love me just as my daughter has after being accidentally locked in the garage for ten terrified minutes when she was three - and just as the baby brother will if he ever finds out his mama let him loose in front of traffic.

A Look Back

Sitting here, as I attempt to write this, the difficulty is still plentiful. Nothing profound, you see, just memories in my mind of my daughter when she was an infant, a toddler, a vivacious 5 year old—those memories sadden me more than please me.

When my daughter was born, I was in a state of postpartum depression. At first, I didn’t know what I was feeling, just that I wasn’t immediately feeling the love and joy that a new mother typically experiences. I was overwhelmed and confused. What was I to do? How am I supposed to raise this innocent tiny human being as my own? I didn’t have a clue and she didn’t come with a manual, just my husband to guide me.

As I look back, I look at my husband with awe and appreciation. I don’t know where I would be if it weren’t for him to be there and recognize the depression that I was experiencing. It was he that helped me through it all when I thought I was going to lose my composure and my mind. It was he that raced home from work within 5 minutes because he knew I was on the edge. At the time, I felt like my world was caving in.

But as the years passed, I grew to be the mother that I have always wanted to be, and as we glided into parenthood without a glimpse of guidance from anybody but each other, we realized that she is our world, our life, our everything. Even though I struggled with postpartum depression during those early months, I quickly grew to love her and understand that what I had experienced wasn’t emotional, but physiological.

Years later, I would have a diagnosis that was a wakeup call for myself and my family. Realizing that during that stage, it was a cocktail for disaster. But I got through it and now that our daughter is an energetic and active 10 year-old, and even though we have many more years with her, I still look back with wonderment and amazement at how I escaped the odds of my physiological state.

All I can do now is look back and reminisce about those days and remember them as much as I can; look at photographs to remind me of her innocence and how the tiniest little smile ruled our world. And at the age of 5 months, remember how she would look up at me from her stroller with the biggest smile on her face, and how it brightened my day. Her first word, her first meal outside of formula and breast milk. When she learned to crawl at 11 months old while I was waiting for a business flight to Chicago during a 10 hour delay, and not long thereafter, when she took her first steps. Her first day of kindergarten and how I watched and cried from afar.

The memories are endless.

I want to remember it all, but I fear that someday, those memories will fade and I will only remember the bigger milestones in her life. I often ask myself, where has the time gone? The memories might die, but the experiences won't.

All I can do is keep my mind and memories fresh, because as I look back, I look on with a sense of pride and accomplishment. It’s time to move forward now and experience new memories for years to come. So even though those new memories might be filled with sadness, they'll be my memories, nevertheless.

Suzanne

Zero To One

My husband used to ask our child-blessed friends which was harder, going from one to two or two to three. I always wanted three. The general consensus was that once you have two, adding more was easy.

I had sailed through college, worked several years including two abroad, entered grad school and married soon after, all along nurturing a horde of hobbies: photography, guitar, hiking, Japanese, on went the list. I held onto my dream in the face of infertility and when I defended my master's thesis eight months pregnant, life was good.

True, I did not like holding, smelling, hearing, or even looking at babies. "It'll be different when it's your own," I'd been told. But countless hours spent in my blue rocking chair, bedroom door shut, weepy eyes studying a tiny suckling infant, heart aching desperately to love her with a fierce maternal bond did not make it so. I was a babysitter and not even a good one.

I lost myself in those postpartum months. Yet in the dark cocoon of depression I was being forever transformed. When at last I spread my wings to soar, I found joy and freedom and beauty in the flight. I discovered the height of a mother's love. I became a mom.

My third child was born this year, and I am happy. My whiteboard pen has been replaced by a feeding spoon, book pages by baby wipes, guitar picking fingers plucking cheerios from linoleum. Though at times I cast a wistful glance at the box of watercolors or the shelf of gourmet cookbooks, I am content to stash them away for a season of life that has redefined me. And I know that if I am ever asked whether it's harder going from one to two or two to three, I will have to say that my greatest challenge was going from zero to one.

Kristina Lim