Inevitable

Some parts of parenthood are inevitable.

It is inevitable, for example, that you will get spit up on as you’re leaving for work. It is inevitable that you will walk around with poop on you until some kindly lady informs you that there is bodily excrement on your person. It is inevitable that you will accidentally hurt your child (accidental pokes, knock downs) , or allow your child to be hurt (not catch him in time, look away for a minute while she gets a bean stuck in her nose), and the guilt will be unbearable.

These haven’t happened to me yet, but they’re coming. (Well, I did once scratch June accidentally with a fingernail and her sad, hurt, angry little cries were terrible to behold. I needed more comforting than she did, in the long run, so guilty did I feel.)

But one inevitable thing has visited our house already. Our baby got an ear infection. And with that came a change in sleep that was unwelcome.

We still try to put her to sleep between 8 and 8:30. This used to be her “prime time” at which we’d put her down and not hear a peep until 5:30 in the morning. We’ve tried elevating one side of her mattress to help relieve the pressure on her ears and in her sinuses, but that had us walking in her room to find her at one end, rotated 90 degrees from where she’d been put down. She scoots, you see.

And with this comes another inevitability. The parent break-down over trivial things. Which is how I came to be crying at work (outside on the patio where no one goes because you don’t cry at work, but For the Love!, it’s hot out there, so now I’m crying and sweating) because I can’t remember any password and username combinations. So I’m pretty sure I have early-onset Alzheimer’s, and isn’t it time NASA implemented simultaneous fingerprint/retina/voice scanning to unlock things instead of stupid passwords anyway, and will our baby ever go back to sleeping through the night?

But then I got a phone call from a husband who tells me to come outside, and it turns out that he brought me a bag of delicious BBQ food for a lunchtime surprise to cheer me up, and I found that it worked. I was cheered. (Why do men in business semi-formal and BBQ have this effect on me? Lord knows.)

I had to reset all my old passwords and now had a brand new set of passwords to forget. And my baby still didn’t sleep longer than 3 hours straight that night. But I sat at my desk and ate BBQ and knew I had a husband who cared and understood me, and my baby still gives me gurgly smiles in the morning, which I guess is what life’s about anyway.