All photos in this post are by the talented Lydia Francis.
Today is the start of Victoria’s last week before she turns one. Before having a baby, I definitely didn’t appreciate the emotional significance of a first birthday to a mama. But almost as soon as I had my sweet girl, I started dreading this week. Each monthly milestone photo was one month closer to THE FIRST BIRTHDAY that loomed so large in my mind. I think it has to do with feeling like her first birthday is the end of my time with her as a true baby. Now she’ll be walking on her own literally any day, can play independently for fairly long stretches of time, is interacting with other kids, and is generally growing into more of a toddler than an infant for sure. Yes, we hope and pray to have more babies, but there will never be another first year with our Victoria Jane. She is one unique little lady who is changing before our eyes every day. Two mamas I admire described it in ways I don’t think I can improve on: I believe it was Erin Napier who said that every night when you put your baby to sleep it’s like a little goodbye, because you know a slightly different baby will greet you in the morning. And as Victoria Strader said, being a mama is “the true definition of bittersweet.” Amen.
I think the one thing that will be a balm to my sentimental soul this week will be ensuring that this special occasion is properly celebrated and documented. There will be lots of blog posts, and I’m sure I’ll cry at some point while writing each one. There will be lots of reminiscing about what we were doing at this time last year, because this is the week that changed my life forever. But today I will start with a reflection on one year of motherhood: how it has changed me, what I have been learning, and my biggest impressions from the past year (in no particular order).
1. The amount of love I have for this baby is paralleled only by the amount of worry I have about her. The stereotype about how having a baby is like having your heart walking around outside your body is so true for me. This started early. I was thankful not to have postpartum depression in the first few months with her (I kind of thought I would!), but I definitely had some postpartum anxiety. For me, this manifested itself in having irrational worries about her, like worrying that maybe we somehow brought home the wrong baby (no reason to think this, just random anxiety!) or that she was going to fall off our apartment balcony (nevermind that no one ever took her out on the balcony). I’m grateful I read about this phenomenon and realized it was a common postpartum side effect. I was even more grateful when it passed, but now that she’s mobile and exploring the world more and more, I’m kind of always in a state of heightened alert. If she’s awake, part of my brain is thinking about whether she’s eating something she could choke on, climbing on something she could fall off of, or god forbid, potentially getting sunburned. I know this is normal, because it’s obviously how I keep her safe, but it has certainly been a defining part of my past year. Loving someone so much who is also so vulnerable is just a weighty reality to live in moment by moment. The C.S. Lewis quote, “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken” has never rung more true.
2. I need more help than I originally thought I would. I could write an entire post on this, so buckle up. When I worked for Southern Weddings, we had a wonderful nanny who was here during my work hours. This was not just helpful, obviously, it was necessary. And life was still a massive struggle, because when I had help I was working for SW, but outside of that I still expected myself to function like a stay at home mom as far as solely handling all the cooking, cleaning, errands, and business of our family was concerned. I was almost always in survival mode, and I just kept thinking I wasn’t working hard enough and could do it if I just tried to be more efficient. Well, I made the transition to actual stay-at-home-mom shortly before the SW announcement and started to realize that I still couldn’t get everything done that I needed to, much less things I wanted to, like writing on this blog! VJM needs constant supervision, and nap times just aren’t long enough. This was food for thought, but I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to being hard on myself. A couple months later I started work (very part-time) as our church’s children’s ministry coordinator, and thankfully that gave me a reason to look for some babysitting hours in my week. Now I have two fantastic mother’s helpers, but you want to know what? I have more hours of childcare than strictly what I need to work for the church, and we’re getting our house professionally cleaned every once in a while too. AND SANITY HAS BEEN RESTORED. I’m still working on not feeling guilty about getting some help to make sure we’re not in a constant state of chaos.
3. Similarly, self care is not as selfish as I thought. This is in the same vein as the above, with a slight twist. Now that I have the blessing and privilege of being home with my baby full time, I kind of got into the mindset that everything I do should be benefitting her or our family. And over the past year I’ve realized that “self care” isn’t just having nights out for yoga classes. For me, it’s about not completely losing my identity in wife life and motherhood. Will has always been a hugely supportive cheerleader for me to get out of the house and get a pedicure or make time for this blog and going to the gym and making sure that I still have some semblance of a life outside of carrying my baby around and constantly cleaning her and her messes up. 🙂 It took me a really long time to admit that, hey, I’m actually a more engaged, more energetic, happier mom when I still feel a little bit like the person I was before and still do some things that are unrelated to motherhood. For most of this year I kind of just dropped everything I did before, but I’m ready to bring parts of life outside of Victoria back. I’m still working out what hobbies and habits are most important for the limited time I can get here and there, but I’ve turned some attention to this subject! Now if we could just figure out how I could also give Will some time to ride his bike and ensure we still have family time too…
4. Sticking to baby schedules was the single greatest decision we made this year. I knew from the beginning of pregnancy that I was going to be one of those rigid schedule kind of mamas, and honestly, I just can’t even imagine attempting to do it any other way. We started our Babywise/Moms on Call schedules in the hospital even though those books don’t really even recommend that, because I just thought, how else am I supposed to know if she’s getting enough food if I don’t just attempt to feed her every three hours? In the craziness and change that is the first year with baby, the schedules were my rock. I like to follow directions, and I love to know when nap time will be so I can plan our day and still know she’s getting enough rest. Yes, there are those who couldn’t imagine being ruled by a schedule, and it is definitely inconvenient at times not to be able to leave the house when you want to, but for us it was just a lifesaver. The first month definitely had days where we had to go comfort her every five minutes, but there were not many times we had to do extra feedings since we already fed her so often. She started sleeping through the night at 6 weeks and never looked back. Now the only time we have nap issues is when teeth are about to pop through, but I would be cranky too!
5. That said, sometimes making time to be in community is more important than the nap schedule. Now that I’ve sung my schedules’ praises, I’ll say that at some point after the six month mark, we started missing a morning nap on Thursday mornings so we could go to the moms’ Bible study at our church. She wouldn’t sleep through it in her stroller anymore, and I even tried bringing her pack ‘n’ play and finding her a quiet spot to no avail. Eventually I decided that group was a huge and important part of my mental health and time to talk to other adults, so we decided we could miss morning naps just on Thursdays. Sometimes this threw her off and she wouldn’t take an afternoon nap either, but generally, missing one nap was ok once a week. I am so much happier on the days we get out of the house and connect with friends, and (in moderation) it’s worth the hassle of loading her up in the car and being a little off our routine.
6. Nothing in this life is more fascinating than watching your baby grow and learn new skills. Honestly, seeing her learn the pincher grasp and feed herself or start to stand up on her own and cruise around the furniture or make a specific sound every time she sees Pippa enter a room is just the craziest thing. It’s all so fast. I am always thinking about how a year ago she couldn’t roll over from her back and now she’s just all over the place and I can barely keep up with her. Each new development is just so exciting, and watching her grow into her own person with her own personality and agenda is like witnessing a daily miracle.
7. If motherhood doesn’t teach me how to let go of perfectionism, guilt, and regret, then nothing will. (But the regret and guilt is TOUGH.) One of my mama friends posted on her baby’s first birthday that if she’s being honest, the first year celebration was a little hard because she regretted having to work so much during her baby’s first year. For some mamas it’s not being able to breastfeed, not having the labor story they wanted, or their baby having terrible colic or… fill in the blank. For me, it’s that Victoria has what looks like a dent in her forehead when she raises her eyebrows from where she pulled my big DSLR camera off her dresser and onto her head. (It’s not really a dent, but it’s a long story.) It pains me to see it every day, because I know it was preventable if only I just hadn’t set my camera down there and turned to get her dress. Thankfully it’s just a cosmetic thing that will hopefully go away eventually, but I can barely put into words how much I wish her perfectly smooth forehead from before June 4th would magically come back. But when she still had a bruise every mama we saw would tell me stories of the horrible falls and accidents her baby survived. And I’m starting to come to terms with accidents as just part of this earthly life. I’ve had to let go of a lot of mistakes this year from the sunburn she got in Scotland to not posting all of her monthly photos on time to not being able to find enough cute goldendoodle decorations for her birthday party. It’s a sanctifying experience that is finally teaching me that I can’t be a perfect mama. I can only do the best I can and love that baby with all I’ve got. And that really just has to be enough (especially because I don’t want her to be self conscious about the dent!).
8. Date nights are a real and necessary thing. Ah, parenthood and marriage. For the most part, loving on this baby together has just brought us closer. I’m grateful we agree on most parenting strategies, just like we agree on most things in life, which is a big reason I married this guy! It makes life easier. But obviously, we’ve had our times where we talked exclusively about Victoria and all our time together was spent taking care of her. That’s why it’s so important to get out of the house or just consciously try to talk about other things and remember that we still have lives outside of her. We haven’t been fantastic with the date night thing yet, but it’s on our agenda, because we’ve noticed how life-giving the few times we’ve been able to reconnect outside of parenthood have been.
9. Travel will never be the same, but we’re not sure if that’s a bad thing. We kind of inadvertently did a lot of travel in Victoria’s first year. In fact, she’s been to 14 states and 2 foreign countries and has taken 13 flights. We just never left her. In fact, I’ve never been away from her for a night! Over all, we have had so much fun experiencing new places with her. Everything is more fun with our sweet little buddy by our side. But of course, as they say, our vacations this year were better described as “trips.” We definitely had to work a lot on those trips and adjust our schedules to fit in naps and feedings. On the other hand, I’ve wondered if I could even enjoy a vacation if we left her with her grandparents, because I think I’d miss her too much to have fun! (And we’re still breastfeeding, so really, being away from her is more trouble than it’s worth.) In a nutshell, some of my fears from this post were accurate. But the fun of seeing the world with her is totally better, and I think that’s only going to get more and more true as she can appreciate more things with us!
10. Attitude about the amount of time and energy a baby requires is everything. So far, the hardest part of parenthood for us has not been the first three months, but actually the last several months since she started crawling. Right now, she can zoom across a room at lightning speeds and wants to climb on and get into absolutely everything. Everything goes into her mouth. Add to that the fact that she has no concept of danger or gravity, and you have the need for constant and extremely hands-on supervision. This really what’s behind number 2 above. We’ve found that if she’s awake, we have to have twice the amount of time to do anything we used to do together, since one of us has to be on full-time Cora Jane duty. There is no multitasking. Truthfully, this is exhausting, especially when we went to the beach and were under the impression that we may still have some time to relax like in the old days. But we’ve found that it’s all about attitude. If I’m looking for more help from Will or wishing I could just do something on my agenda for a minute, it’s really draining and hard to give her the attention that she needs. But if I’m focused on what a privilege it is to be her mama and get to have quality time to play with her, it’s really just a joy.
11. Being a mama changes your friendships in wonderful and hard ways. The first thing I noticed back when I was pregnant was how being a mama was like entering into some sort of secret sorority I didn’t know existed. I’ve never been so close with my friends who also have kids–you just have so many common experiences and both so desperately need other mamas to bounce ideas off of and share experiences with. I have just found that other mamas are always reaching out, asking me how it’s going, and answering my questions, and I try to do that for my friends who had their first baby after me! But it’s also so much harder to have a quality conversation in person or on the phone with anyone. In person, we are usually halfway through a thought when we need to take care of a baby situation of some kind, so I often feel like I come away from play dates not having been able to actually connect with anyone since we’re all so distracted! On the other hand, phone conversations should work in theory, but I usually either don’t have the mental energy for them or am again, just too distracted to focus on what’s being said. I think this is a big reason why motherhood can be so isolating, but I have to remember that this very hands-on phase is not forever.
12. The depth of my love for her has changed me forever. And really, the novel I’ve written above can be summed up in this: we’ve never known a love like this! That baby’s smile from across a room just melts me in a way I didn’t know was possible before. Her sweet hugs where she wraps her arms around my neck and grabs fistfuls of my hair are heaven on earth. I’ll never get over how soft her skin is, how much I love to hear her babbling to herself in her car seat, or how much I love her many expressions and her curiosity and zest for life. It’s completely true that you are just more emotional in general after becoming a parent. I can’t watch commercials involving newborns or see other people’s new babies and not get all teary and joyful for them. It’s just an experience like no other that has opened my eyes to the beauty and potential heartbreak in this world in so many big and small ways. And we’re so, so thankful.
All photos in this post are from what was technically supposed to be our six-month photo shoot with Lydia Francis, but honestly I wanted outdoor photos in sunlight so we had to wait for some warm weather, and miss V was eight months here. AND IT’S OKAY.
