Motherhood is a series of calculations

Motherhood is a series of calculations. From the time your baby comes home from the hospital, you’re doing math. If he ate at 11 a.m. that means he needs to eat again at 1 p.m. even if he ate until 12:45 p.m. Right? Yes? If he’s been asleep for 45 minutes then he will need to eat for 15 minutes and then scream a little for 30 more minutes. I think.

Now that he’s a toddler the math is a little more arbitrary — not that it could ever have been deemed straightforward — and I sit in silence for moments on end, staring into the space above the bookshelf wondering when the hell I’m supposed to get our daily walk in if he’s snack motivated and the popsicles are melted and he’s not currently into ritz crackers. 

If he’s watched five episodes of Paw Patrol and played in the dirt patch by the front porch for 30 minutes that means he’s a well-rounded kid, yes? If he didn’t touch the yogurt but had at least two finger-fuls of granola, he had a well-balanced breakfast. Right?

The endless one-sided conversations feel stilted after a while. Part of me is asking the other part, shouldn’t you have this all figured out by now? The other part of me is still staring at the wall. 

I ask Caswell, do you want this or that or this or that do you want to go here or there or do you want to try this new thing or this new thing or this old thing or this old thing do you like this or do you hate this? He screams at me.

If he’s napped for three hours, that’s good but if the three hours bleed into late afternoon that can be very, very bad. If he nursed all night he’ll wake up happy or he will wake up really angry. If he likes it when I read him Good Night Moon every night for one entire week he will shove it, hard, into my face on day eight. 

If he hates the bike and the bike trailer for weeks on end he will crawl into the shed and stand up and take a wobbling step towards the bikes, spinning the pedals and saying “go.” He will point at the bike trailer and I will remove it from the shed and he will sit in it and sink back, as if he’s never found a more comfortable seat. 

I will bike around the neighborhood for fifteen minutes while he sits, quietly, contentedly, occasionally murmuring into the wind.

I think of the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and while I cannot quite remember the narrative arc or the moral of the story I imagine that it goes something like: if you give a mouse a cookie, he will want more cookies. And I do not think that the author ever met someone like Caswell who will potentially want more cookies but will likely shatter your soul with an unexpected meltdown before you ever get the chance to ask him in the first place.

When I zoom out, which I so rarely do, I realize how very lucky I am to be knee deep in these daily equations. Where I often wallow in the remnants of a recent meltdown or some kind of horrid mommy-shaming realization (he really should be eating more than just buttered toast) I pause and relish my day-to-day existence. I’ve never been good at having perspective. I’ve also never been good at math. But here we are.

I wonder how I will survive the rest of his life. I say that as both a joke and plea for someone to please lobotomize me before my darling boy becomes a teenager. When the calculations become more complicated, what will I do? Who will he be? Who will I be? Will he still be happy to see me, inexplicably yelling “deddy!” every time I walk into the room?

We are on the tail end of a three hour nap. When he wakes up I think he will want to watch funny cat videos on YouTube and eat jelly on toast. He will likely push his trucks around the coffee table for a while after that, and by the time dada gets home he’ll be ready to practice his newfound toddle, holding desperately to the couch, the table, the bookcase as he makes his way around the room. 

He grins when he practices walking, and at 22 months old he is certain he is the first baby to discover such a feat. The average baby walks long before this mile marker and I work on the relishing, not the wallowing, when I think how much patience and grace Caswell has taught me. If I can always show up for him as he shows up in the world — loud, unashamed and entirely certain of how he’s feeling in any given moment, I think I’ll have gotten at least one equation right.