Top Ten Tuesday: Mommy Confessional

In the four months I’ve been writing this blog (yes, it’s been four months — why aren’t I world famous yet?), I’ve done my best to provide you readers (all six of you) with plenty of frank details about my fears, obsessions, and overall insanity. No sugar-coating here, folks: I’ve admitted to being prone to crankiness and worrying that sweet Bubba will follow suit, mocked myself for panicking over leaving my child with Grandma for 24 hours, confessed my former life as a loser, and just yesterday I exposed myself as a hypocrite with the dietary habits of a five year old.

(As a sidenote, I must say that with thrilling posts like those, I’m shocked this blog hasn’t blown up in popularity! I’m so relatable. Who among us doesn’t write mental letters to Dear Abby as a form of self-therapy?)

But despite all the stories and glimpses into my brain I’ve already regaled you with, guess what? There are some things I have not yet shared! In fact, I can think of precisely ten secrets and crazy thoughts that I haven’t gotten around to discussing. How convenient for a Tuesday!

Wait no longer: here are my Top Ten Mommy Confessions (that I haven’t already told you about):

10) I long for the day the baby can be entertained by the TV. Not all the time, of course — I’m not a total degenerate (yet). But it’s going to be a few years before he will (hopefully) be entertained by reading to himself, and Mommy is going to need an excuse for thirty minutes of quiet in the meantime.

9) I fear for his life every time he sleeps more than an hour. I go through this every single morning and every day that he’s kind enough to grace me with a nap of decent duration. I start thinking about how quiet he is in there and how he’s been sleeping for so long, and my heart starts racing: what if he’s been dead this whole time, and I’ve been out here sleeping/eating/watching TV/blogging like a naive idiot? I open his door, holding my breath and mentally reciting “please don’t be dead” (at least I don’t say it out loud!)…and then he wakes up from the sound of the door opening and I don’t even care because hey, at least he’s alive!

Again…relatable.

8) On a lighter note, I wish he would hold his own bottle so i could read while feeding him. This is selfish, I know. But it would be so delightful to get 20 minutes of reading in from time to time! And I know he’s capable of doing it as I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes on a few joyous yet fleeting occasions. He just refuses. He likes to keep his hands free to poke my eyeballs, pull my hair, and learn about teeth since he doesn’t have any of his own:

7) I immediately delete any photos that don’t adequately represent his cuteness. He’s adorable and I cannot allow any evidence that may suggest otherwise to exist.

6) I worry a lot that I’m not doing enough to ensure that he’s smart. Am I supposed to be teaching him things? Should I be reading to him more? Is my “TV on in the background all the time” habit rotting his brain? Perhaps I should stop wasting time worrying and instead invest that time into doing something to further this goal, but, as mentioned, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. So I fret.

5) He’s such a good baby that I feel guilty for ever being tired or wanting a break. It feels wrong to want a reprieve from someone so happy and fun. But…

4) Sometimes I’m secretly happy to hand him over the babysitter so I can work. I honestly would prefer to be a stay-at-home-mom and dream of winning the lottery and making it happen (unfortunately I am too practical to buy lottery tickets and thus this dream is sure to remain unfulfilled), but I’d be lying if I claimed to be sad about the situation every day. There are days when working actually seems easier than parenting and I am happy to let someone else handle that while I use a different part of my brain for a few hours.

3) Any time he doesn’t seem interested in me, I worry that he’s developing autism. As an avid Babysitters Club fan in my youth (and in my adulthood; I may or may not have a box containing books 1-79 in my closet at this very moment), I learned all about autism via the horribly-written and grossly inaccurate Kristy and the Secret of Susan. Despite every other thing I’ve ever read about autism in the ensuing years, I remain convinced that my child could at any moment morph into a catatonic piano-playing savant.

(necessary disclaimer: I would of course still love my child if he were to follow in the aforementioned Susan’s footsteps. And yes, I know not all people with autism are savants. Take it up with Ann M. Martin.)

2) Now that he falls asleep on his own, I miss rocking him to sleep in my arms. I actually get really excited when he needs to be rocked back to sleep every once in a while, because during the day he never wants to snuggle with me for more than two minutes at a time (he’d much rather be climbing on me or throwing toys or trying to crawl behind the TV). I just don’t want to have to do it every night.

1) I think I’m a really good mom. I’m not perfect by a longshot, and I’m admittedly quite insane. But despite all my worries and all the self-deprecation, I can’t help but look at this face and think “I must be doing something right”:

Shit, now I’m out of things to blog about. Let’s hope Bubba does something cute and/or gives me a new reason to worry* ASAP so I have something to write about.

*something innocuous, of course. I feel I must include this qualifier lest I invite pain and suffering upon myself; The Universe is a spiteful bitch.