Living things change. They adapt and grow and die. Trees leaf out, snakes molt, babies grow up into frat boys. It just happens. So why is it I thought the moment I had a baby that I would be a full-grown mother? It came to me a few months ago when I was talking with… Read More Happy Mother’s Day from a 2-and-a-half-year-old mom
Remember the video I posted of my conversation with T when she was 38 weeks (roughly 9 months) pregnant? Well, here she is a month after we had that first talk–3 weeks after giving birth to her baby boy. I love her willingness to share and how she captures that kind of floaty, coming-back-down-to-earth feeling… Read More What becoming a mother looks like for T at 3 weeks post-partum
Other than a couple brief moments of rocking a swaddled newborn to sleep, I just started having some moments of, “now THIS is what I thought being a mom was going to be like.” And J will be 2 and a half next month. Do tell, what were the images you had in your head… Read More What I thought motherhood would look like
I met a friend for beer the other night. It felt pretty momentous. She was the friend I vaguely referenced in an earlier blog post with whom I’d had a schism. Our schism was about our children, and our different styles of raising them. And after a couple of emotional conversations, several weeks of emails… Read More On judging other parents
Before I became a mother, I was grotesquely good at taking care of other people. I credit my naturally empathetic, sensitive nature, my incredible-caretaker mother and my co-dependent upbringing. In the months before I got pregnant, it dawned on me that my constant tracking of other people’s emotional and physical needs could be an asset… Read More On taking care of myself
My dear friend Ellie gave birth to her daughter a year ago yesterday. So to celebrate S’s first year and Ellie and Ben’s survival of it, I made them this:
In those newborn days, as I was beat about the head and shoulders with glassy-eyed smiles and it-all-goes-by-so-fast proclamations, I finally broke down and recorded my first video blog. I didn’t know what planet everyone else was living on, but it seemed like some of the slowest time I’d ever waded through in my life.… Read More It IS the longest shortest time!
I thought I was ahead of the curve when I opted to read less how-to parenting advice and use my maternal instincts more. But for things like newborn sleep, toddler tantrums, my instincts have failed me royally. Turns out that in situations like these, nothing replaces the sage advice of a skilled expert. Resources I… Read More On intuition vs. experience
My experience as a new mother has sometimes been how I expected it to be and more often alot grittier–which has led me to wonder, why don’t parents talk more about “the dark side” of having kids? More food for thought: http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/ http://www.twentytworeviews.bonniefortune.info/index.html
Stephanie Mackley 