A New Baby, a Dose of Hysteria & the Dog Food Fork

Today's a big ol day in our house: a day of remembering, of laughing, of shaking my head, of reminiscing about how far we've come since 1998. Today is my son Chase's 11th birthday.

I was only lucky enough to have one child and so while it seems so totally mom-ish to do this, I can't help but reflect on when Chase was born (6:33 p.m.) 11 years ago and how my life changed afterwards. Before you yawn and click elsewhere, bear with me. I'll try to limit my sappiness here but ya gotta cut me some slack on my kid's birthday.

Chase came along when I was 27 years old (yeah, yeah, now you know how old I am; you're a genius). I thought then that my timing was ideal. It was well after I'd graduated college (a personal goal: school THEN children, not vice versa or even simultaneously) and I'd enjoyed many adult years getting to be all selfish with my life. Yet I was still young enough to have plenty of energy for the sleepless nights and the activity-filled days.

The day Chase arrived--unprompted and ON his due date, thank you very much since it's the only thing I've ever done on time in my life--he was without a doubt the best thing that had happened to me. If you have children, you fully understand this. If you have not had children, this is monumental beyond comprehension. Sure, you think you know how much you'd love a child. It makes sense that you would. But it's only after you see this creation, after he or she exists, that you realize what it means to truly love something more than you love yourself. And you better because your days of loving yourself the most are over. I mean over-rover. Sure, I brought home this beautiful baby and everything was rose petals and honey. For about two days. And then, you know, some initial shock began to set in. Alright, some hysterics, mixed with a little hiding in the bathroom crying and wondering when someone was going to swoop in to help because caring for a baby took every minute of every single day and...and...when was I going to bathe?!! or eat?!! Forget about sleeping--I mean, I knew those days were going to be over for quite awhile but nobody told me that you had to completely restructure every second of your day, waking and sleeping. My world was still revolving, to be sure, but here was the stunner: I was no longer the center of it. He was. Yep, there is no amount of pre-planning for that reality. You expect the love, you expect things to change, but you just don't realize quite how much until bam! From one day to the next--literally--your life and how you live it is 180 degrees altered.

About six days in to my new dose of reality, I reached a breaking point. Though my mother was staying with me for a week or so, she lived two hours away and I knew she'd be leaving soon. My hysteria over this motherhood business was mounting and I don't think I was hiding it as well as I thought I was. So on this particular night, I'd slunked out of my cry-hole (the bathroom) and was sitting at the kitchen table trying to eat the spaghetti my mother had made--and though she's a good cook, hormones have a way of making eating the very last thing you want to do. But since I was nursing, some stubborn rationale wouldn't let me forget that food was a necessity so I was struggling to get what seemed like cement down my throat. Mom and I were talking about another episode Chase had just had where he'd been sleeping and then suddenly he gasped for breath and we realized he hadn't been breathing just prior to that. My mother said: "That's scary, Megan. You're reeeeeeally going to have to watch him closely." Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? I was worrying about feeding him enough and on time, keeping him comfy and warm, keeping the cats from smothering him, keeping the air dust-free, changing his diaper, keeping him from scratching his face, keeping all the well wishes from putting their germ-infested hands on him, and so on and so on. But one thing I sort of thought he might handle on his own was breathing. But now I had to monitor that too?

That extra nugget of need-to-do pushed me over the brink into Overwhelmed Land. A terrible place you don't want to visit. And I was sitting there, digesting this new addition to my ever expanding need-to-do list and choking down cement spaghetti when I looked down and realized I was eating with the fork I'd dubbed "the dog food fork" because it was the one I used for precisely that: scooping out wet can dog food into the pooches' bowls. And now I was eating with it! "Oh mannnnnnn," I pitifully lamented. "I'm eating with the dog food fork." And then, no matter where you might have been in the world (yes, you) at that precise moment, you heard my howling. You didn't know what it was at the time, but now you know. It was me. That damn fork was the straw that broke the new mother's back.

I came unglued. Luckily my wise, know-it-all-because-I've-been-through-all-this-myself mother just waited it out. Once the hysteria subsided, I sat there in stunned silence, realizing that this was no temporary life change and completely unsure of how I would handle it all. And that's when my own mother uttered a comment that profoundly changed my scope: "Megan," she said, "I can't tell you today how you'll handle everything that needs to be handled with this baby. But I can tell you this: you will handle it. Somehow, some way. Because failure isn't in you, and I know you'll be great at motherhood too."

Simple, right? There was no grand plan, no flow chart or alphabetized to do lists, but her reassurance reminded me to take it all a day at a time, an hour at a time, a feeding at a time. And what do you know, here we are 11 years later, eating three square meals a day, bathing and everything.

After that first week, maybe two, of complete shock and awe, I got into a routine with Chase. I was borderline militant about it but I believe his very structured feeding, bathing and bedtime schedules were what resulted in Chase being an immensely happy baby who rarely fussed. Either he was comforted in knowing there was a definite time he'd get fed again, be put into a warm bed and so on, or God saw the depth of my freak-out potential and decided to cut me some slack.

Those were rough days of getting acclimated but I couldn't believe how much I adored this child who'd initially scared the crap out of me. And for the past 11 years, this fellow has evolved into a mini-me. Folks tell us all the time that we are the spitting image of one another, and I jokingly say that considering all the work I put in, the least he could do was look like me. LOL

Chase is an exceptional kid who makes me laugh all the time, he's impressed me with his athletic ability (which he DID NOT get from me, thank God), he's well-mannered, well-behaved and emphathetic to all around him, and he makes me thankful every single day for his presence. Oh, and he makes sure I don't accidentally eat from the dog food fork.

Happy Birthday, Chase! I love you ~

Just over a year old:


At five years old:


At eight years old:


And just last Christmas: