Words in a waltz

It’s amazing what a teensy, blotchy, red, wrinkly newborn can do to your life. Days begin, bleed into nights, and you won’t have the foggiest clue. Sleep is fleeting, your ears relentlessly resound that shrill bawling, and self-grooming becomes a far-flung dream. There’s seldom time to do anything but heed to the little one’s wails and whimpers, and the house seems, of a sudden, to have filled with an ocean of clothes and papers. Outings are limited to quick trips to the baby store, and stirring out of the house as and when you please is strictly taboo. Diapers and wipes fill up the closets, and the layette brims with tons of similar, zip-sized baby gear, sending you into a tizzy. Social life is limited to incessant tiffs with the other half, mostly over nothing (this, of course, is blamed on the hormones and the inexorable postpartum blues). Despite all the groundwork you did beforehand, this new responsibility turns your life topsy-turvy; and amidst all the frenzy and turmoil in your mind, you somehow end up devoting every iota of your being to this new creature that has become the hub of everything. It would be lying to say that you don’t miss being pregnant - although bouts of those guttural mood swings and that undying lethargy do continue to live on. Now, as a brand new momma, I can’t help but hark back at the days when I had to waddle my way about like a dodgy-podgy penguin, when I would try and fail each time at dressing my puffed feet up with matching pairs of socks, and when I would easily wolf down those extra servings of dessert, as ‘I had to eat for two,’ amongst other things. Even as my little angel tries to make sense of the world around her, I find myself smiling in the face of stress and the future wondering what kind of parent I am going to turn out, in the long run, to be. And although I miss so many things that make up the average Jane’s life, I’m over the moon, and I feel so complete - darn, I’m a mom! And as ‘giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child - then the mother is born,’ I so want to hail Erma Bombeck.