Worrying

 My baby is sleeping sideways in his crib, his head almost touching the bars. I'm watching him on the video monitor on my phone, partly because I'm worried he's going to wake up and end my "free time" and partly because he thrashes his head in his sleep sometimes, so I'm worried he's going to whack it on the crib bars. I don't know what I think watching on the camera will do to prevent this. 

I knew having a baby would mean worrying all the time, so that's not a surprise. Really what's surprising to me is how much all of this parenthood stuff is not a surprise. I suppose I did my research? I suppose I paid attention to my friends and my sisters-in-law and all the other people around me who had baby after baby while we weren't—while we were traveling to Greece and Belize and New Zealand and Croatia. Or maybe I just got used to the worrying while we were losing baby after baby, pregnancy after pregnancy. Sometimes I feel like I've been in a constant state of worry since that first day in the hospital with the twins—or maybe before. Maybe it was when my grandma died, when my mom called me while I was at a client's office and said, "I think this may be it, Haley." 

Can everyone pinpoint the time in their lives when they first realize no, things actually aren't going to be okay, and no, everything isn't going to "just work itself out?"

Michael is installing a baby gate at the top of the stairs. He starts hammering something and I check the monitor again—no movement. It's funny how when Simon was new Michael would wait until the baby woke up to run the vacuum anywhere upstairs, and now here is he, pounding a hammer 15 feet away from his door. We're getting used to parenthood, I suppose, though again, getting used to it has been easier than I expected. Sometimes when I call myself "Mommy,"—"Where did Mommy put her phone, Simon?"—it takes me aback how easily that word comes out. There was no conscious moment where I was shocked or giddy to think, "Wow, I'm a mom now!" I just became Mommy somehow, at some point, and it wasn't jarring or a huge mental shift or—what I was most scared of in my 20s when I thought about motherhood—a loss of myself. In fact, I think I feel like more myself. Maybe that, too, is because my head and my heart made that change four years ago and I've just been a mom without a baby for a long time. 

Michael's hammering again, and this time Simon wakes up. I bring him down to the office and set myself up next to him on the floor with my laptop so I can keep writing—this is how I spend a lot of my time, now, on the floor next to the baby with my laptop. It's a luxury to be able to keep him at home and still work, something that stays top of mind every time I make myself nauseous researching daycare or nannies. He babbles at me and plays with his toy, and as I smile at him I notice it: a red bump on his head. 

"Did you bump your head on your crib, baby?" I ask, cuddling him and kissing the red spot. Is it actually indented a little? When did it happen? He doesn't seem bothered by it at all and there's no blood, just a little redness, but that doesn't stop me from spending the next 15 minutes Googling infant head injuries. Something I already Googled a few months ago, I might add, when Michael accidentally threw Simon into the ceiling. 

I haven't been to see my therapist since Simon was born, but I've been trying to remember her advice to stay in the moment. When I was pregnant and worrying, she suggested I avoid thinking "Everything will be fine," which my history told me wasn't always true, and instead say "At this moment in time, everything is fine." This all seems logical and makes sense, but what if I stop worrying and somehow by stopping worrying a bad thing happens that I could have stopped by worrying about it? What if there's some supernatural force that monitors how much you're taking something for granted and comes to wallop you in the side of the head if you're not diligent enough?