Expertise Just Comes
June 6, 2006 by kate baggott
Filed under Baby Care, Mental Health
It’s been unseasonably cold in central Europe for the past 7 to 10 days. On the first of JUNE, I had to put two jackets on the baby just to take her for a walk. Maybe because of the weather, that we all spent the weekend being sick. My son, in particular was coughing for national pride last night. If whoever is in charge would just send along the gold medal (or is that cold medal)…
It hasn’t been all bad. We’ve been quiet and inactive and I’ve been reading Waiting for Birdy by Catherine Newman. 
It’s a collection of essays spanning her second pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. Newman is a funny woman who follows my cardinal rule of good humour: Making fun of other people has a limit, but making fun of yourself, that is an endless source of laughs.
Her experiences reminded me of some of my own and inspired me to realise that, as a mother, I have come a long way.
My husband was changing jobs when our first baby was born. That meant, he was home with us for the first month of our son’s life. We did everything together as a brand new family and the baby’s needs came first. So, we’d plan a trip to the store and get caught in the nurse, nap, diaper change, nurse, nap cycle of a newborn. Somehow, it would take two adults four hours to get one little baby ready to go grocery shopping. Then, we’d get to the grocery store and see a lone woman with a newborn and another kid looking like grocery shopping was the easiest thing in the world to do.
Now, I am that lone woman facing down the aisles of fruit and vegetables with two children. Most surprising is that now, while I am shopping with two children, I plan the weekly menu in one sphere of my brain while the other sphere thinks about re-writing that piece for the exacting editor of Busted Halo or selling the essay I wrote about paying off my student loans. As a first time mother venturing out of the nest, all I could think about was, “Oh God, what if he needs to nurse, be changed, burped, go to sleep, or what if he cries?”
All I can say, is that intense kind of worry just fades. And if it can fade for people as neurotic as Catherine Newman and I, then it can fade for you too.
