I found out I was pregnant the week my husband and I packed a Uhaul bound for St. Louis. For almost two years, I wondered when I’d really arrive.
I don’t mean in St. Louis. Our cross-country road trip was completed before I even got morning sickness, and I’ve been a regular walker in Tower Grove Park for almost twenty months now. I mean, I wondered when I’d know I’d really arrived in motherhood – when I’d stop feeling like a new kid and more like a native as a mom.
I knew it wouldn’t be in the early weeks, which were all fumbling-in-the-dark diaper changes, midnight feeds, and getting accustomed to our new baby. Fresh from the hospital, she had the herky-jerky movements of an animatronic doll and smiles that were glimpsing and gassy. The first time she slept for four hours straight I was delighted, then afraid– was there something wrong, and if there was, how could I fix it?
Eventually, I got confident. Eventually, the velcro folds of her swaddle became familiar in the dark – but just in time for her to outgrow it. Then came the sleep regression, the rolling, the first fever, the first fall. The infant car seat I’d just mastered smoothly snapping into the stroller was just as smoothly outgrown and sailing into storage. Then teeth! Four of them! And figuring out how to do solids, and scheming how to keep the kitchen clean before surrendering to the shmutz.
Again, the feeling that I had almost, but not quite, arrived at competence as a mother. Again the finding of a rhythm only to find that it was changing – because of a baby whose newfound claps were distinctly to her own beat.
Not long ago, I sat next to a colleague, a mother I admired, at the beginning of a meeting. She asked me how things were going. I told her how I’d scrambled to find a sitter, and how our daughter had started walking, and that I, almost a year in, was still waiting for things to slow down. She looked at me with unmistakable kindness before telling me, “They won’t.”
There was empathy in her smile and also a trace of mischief – as if to say the chaos would continue, but also, within it, the joy. I knew I’d been told that already, but I hadn’t really been listening. The sentiment was obvious, so it was easy to ignore.
The first few months of motherhood, after all, are information-rich. You take notes in doctor’s offices, pore over instruction manuals for snot suckers and car seats, watch Instagram reels from mom-fluencers that tell you to read their captions, then read captions that say you ought to read their e-book, too. Occasionally, someone will remind you that the time is fleeting and special. You put that information alongside the other things you have to remember (and typically forget).
But in my desire to arrive at a kind of motherhood that had all of the answers, I’d missed that I was already present to the constancy of change. In my hustle to be one step ahead, I forgot that the fun of it was its unfolding – that motherhood wasn’t just avoiding choking hazards but also watching our daughter throw both her hands over her head in an exuberant salute to oatmeal. It wasn’t just learning how to dress an infant for the weather but witnessing the look on her face the first time she saw a rainstorm. The wind blew hot and strong, and she turned her face into it with a listening, curious, squint.
In an essay, the writer Christine Smallwood wrote that children are “clocks with all their gears showing; you see the time pass in them.” In two weeks, our daughter strikes one. In the second year of her life, in my second full year as a mother, I don’t know what changes are coming; I only know they’re on their way. And I know now it won’t always feel possible to know exactly what I’m doing. But in this next year as we dash after our increasingly quick little toddler, when we can’t catch our breath, I hope we can still gasp with wonder.
Kate Essig is a former high school English teacher who now lives in South City with her family.
