I never wanted children. I was a child myself when my boys started their journeys as separate, literally detached individuals into this world. I didn't really know what to do with the first two.
I naively rocked the first one to sleep every nap and every bedtime for one year, one month, and three and a half days. It was a grave mistake and I realized this upon returning home with baby number two. For the sake of avoiding eternal embarrassment for my boys, they shall hence forth be known as little Jumpin Bean One and little Jumpin Bean Two. Well, let me tell ya...Bean One was all kinds of pissed that Mama Bean JAC had no time for rockies all day and night with the introduction of the second little burrito Bean. Being young as I was - sex education back where I'm from was plantin the devil's seed, but that's another story entirely - it had not occurred to me to deal with the rockies situation BEFORE little bookie Bean Two came along.
It was a little more than a month later I found myself in an ugly place. The man who helped me cook those little Beans into existence - and I use helped here lightly - landed himself in prison, also another story entirely. So, having no self esteem and a moderate case of agoraphobia, I set out into the world to find a job that would support my little bookie Beans. I landed a waitressing job in a restaurant once featured on South Park and shed an entire person off my back, literally and of a more meta note - also a different story entirely. I had moved forward with life, Daddy Bean be damned, without the weight of a seriously toxic relationship, environment, and physical state of being - also another story entirely.
But I digress. Something else happened as I worked tirelessly to support my tiny Beans. I saw them. Perhaps for the first time, I became fully aware that I had brought these itty bitty adorable and oh so vulnerable creatures into being. How fucking cool is that!? Wait...I mean to say how utterly terrifying is that! I came to the realization these little Beans followed me around like newly hatched ducklings, and it was because I was their entire universe. And it was in that moment they became mine. We loved each other unconditionally and that love carried through to the addition of unexpected Jumpin Bean Three. How Bean number three came into being was, you guessed, a different story entirely.
My point here is that if you are a new mother struggling to understand your role in your tiny little burito's life, relax. It will come. Not everyone, for their own unique reasons, will have that magical bonding moment straight out of the womb with your uterus sitting in a sterile pan across the room. Maybe you are horrified at the idea of raising a child by yourself because your own mother, a single mother herself, never dealt with her clinical depression and ager. Maybe her way of mothering made you worry you would just be repeating the cycle. Maybe you were so very young and resented the lost time of your own childhood. Maybe you didn't grasp the epic level of such a life altering, reality bending, roller coaster of puke and diapers this would actually turn out to be. Maybe you were just plain and simple scared shitless. Would you break this tiny thing? What could you offer it? Are you good enough? Will your vagina ever be the same again?
All of that is okay. You're not a freakish, evil, unloving mother. It will come. Don't be so hard on yourself. And for the love of pampers, take a bubble bath girl!
Please join me as I basically spit walls of word vomit at you in an effort to simulate some self-therapeutic recovery as I empty the nest. We'll laugh, we'll cry, we'll drink wine and fancy cheese, we'llreminisce of days gone by and lessons learned the hard way. Down the rabbit hole we go!
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