Kittymomma's Adventures

I’m 35 today. My post about the first anniversary of Lucy’s death pretty much covered the yearly retrospective angle. So, I will talk today about a corollary to that post – the joys and fears of having a second living child again.

I am overjoyed to welcome this baby and so excited about it. The anticipation for her arrival is overwhelming at times. I do feel some trepidation about entering the baby world again, mainly the interrupted sleep and having to work around naps. However, I am just so excited that, even though I warn myself to appreciate sleeping through the night right now, I can’t help wishing for the next 2-3 months to fly by.

This is a second chance for me. (Or is it third?) I get another chance to do this all over again and do it better this time.

The problem is that part of me is afraid I won’t do better.

That’s silly, because I do better with each child. I joke to Chris sometimes that we should have 10 kids, so I can be perfect. 😉 There is so much I feel guilty about with Lucy, though. As far as the accomplishments I listed in my last post, I worry about their place in my life once I have a baby again. I do not want to lose the progress I’ve made, but I don’t want to obsess about not writing and whether I will go back to it while I should be enjoying my newborn daughter. I know normal life will fall by the wayside at first; I’ve done this twice already. With Max and to a lesser extent Lucy, I felt like a failure, because I did not seem to be able to do all the things other mothers did, even those with young children. I seemed to have time for nothing but mothering and then grasping what time I could for myself to stay sane.

The fact is, we made this choice and, in my mind, no other choice existed. I want this baby and I want Max to have at least one living sibling. I’ve worked hard to change my habits and priorities, so that fitting writing back in to my life will come more naturally once the baby is older. Plus, we have literally done this before. This is the third newborn we will bring home, we have had more than one child already, and Max will be much older and an experienced older brother this time. I believe that I will take the newfound confidence I described in Wednesday’s post and apply it to mothering and writing. Believing in and doing it right now will help me to believe and do after the baby comes. I just know it.

This is familiar and uncharted territory all at the same time. If I can traverse the uncharted territory of mothering a child who has died, I can find my way through mothering my second living/thirdborn/fourth overall just fine.