Today I'm a Parent

Call it a mother’s intuition or call it panic, I am taking Bombie to Kaiser today. She’s had pretty bad diarrhea for almost a week now (going on five days today) and calling the advice nurse and speaking with the doctor on call has not helped. This morning her crib looked like a crime scene and in the middle of it was my precious baby. When I gave her a bath, she just sat in the tub listlessly, which is very unlike her. Later, at breakfast, her eyes stared vacantly at nothing. So this time when I called, I insisted I see the doctor. Today. If they didn’t have an appointment for me, I was going to take her to the emergency room. (But, thank God, they do. This afternoon. So we’re waiting for James to come home and then we’re both going in with her.)

This kind of assertiveness is rare for me. I’m one of those people who worries excessively about inconveniencing others. Especially people that I deem to be authority figures – experts of any kind: doctors, teachers, cops, professionals and so on. And I can’t help but see how true the phrase really is, how having a baby really does change everything.

Maybe even me.

The weekend has been enlightening and oddly inspiring. If I haven’t thanked you God for sending me such a wonderful man to call my husband, let me do it now. Thank you. James has been the model of a patient, caring and yet disciplinarian parent. Last week we had some issues with Bombie being difficult and we started time-outs. This weekend she has been sick. And James has – with remarkable precision and intuition – gauged when she needed love and when she needed discipline. I was so in awe all weekend as he ditched his dinner to hold her and sit on the swing outside to make her feel better. He changed her nasty, smelly diapers and he even encouraged me to go to the bookstore like I was planning and not feel like I had to be with Bombie at all times. He did laundry maybe four times because the diapers just weren’t holding the diarrhea. And I was right by his side, I’d like to believe, but I was so stunned at how good he was at being a father that I couldn’t think of much else. (We’re using disposables for this sick period; the cloth diapers were worse!)

And through all this I’m learning something about love, an aspect of it that I hadn’t known before. As we each had dinner by ourselves so the other could hold and rock the baby, as we looked to each other for encouragement or so we didn’t lose the moment to frustration, I believe we learned something about love as duty. It is different. It’s entirely different, for instance, from the selfish love we felt when we were first married. It’s also entirely different from our usual romantic love, although it sure feeds directly into it. I guess you could say when I feel now raising our kids together is a mixture of admiration and pride in our little but growing family. And I can’t help but also feel humbled and grateful to have it and be a part of it.