I keep seeing commercials for this year's Country Music Awards, which take place this Wednesday night, November 9th. Each time the commercial airs (always catching me off guard), I come close to shedding a tear. Literally.
Last year, the CMA's were on Wednesday, November 10th, and I watched them from our labor and delivery room at Prentice Women's Hospital. Jim had run back home to grab our suitcase (it had given me pause, hand on the front door knob, ready to leave for the doctor's office. Should I bring our suitcase, just in case? Don't be silly, I said to myself.).
It was already dark out when we left our doctor's, following his orders to go to the hospital to be induced. The city glowed outside our hospital window, and under any other circumstances I would have looked to see the view (Jim told me later that we faced south). I was filled with such feelings that night. I don't think there will ever be a way to describe them, and those moments of quiet and calm, with my hands resting over my unborn child, have continued to flood my memory in the year since. All by myself and charged with excitement and anticipation, I eventually needed a distraction. And so I settled on watching the Country Music Awards.
Amid the twangs and the fiddling and bluegrass beats, Jim and I text each other updates. Me to him: Typical country music ballad- Someone young with an illness, living through their child's eyes, God watching over them, yadda yadda yadda. Oh, btw, they just broke my water. Him to me: Almost got double parked by a firetruck in front of our building. Feeding cat and out the door.
It has been a year. I can't believe it has been a year.
There are so many ways we have changed. So many things we have learned. We have a 12 month old, a little girl with her own personality, who likes to bounce and bop to music and is in love with a yellow stuffed bunny. She is now walking and can give high fives. How did we go from a newborn to a child who now lifts up each foot when we go to put on her socks?
I knew our newborn would not stay a newborn forever, but it sure felt like it at times. I knew that I would eventually find myself again, how I was before our baby was born, but there were times when I felt I was doomed to a life of drawstring waistbands and hair scrunchies. I knew that, eventually, I could re-enter into conversations with friends about topics unrelated to swaddling and diaper cream. I knew all of this, I think. Still, in the crazy whirl of this first year, buried in a fog of sleep deprivation, there were moments when I wasn't so sure we would ever return to "normal."
And that is just it. We won't ever return to normal, because we now have a new normal. My new normal is to wear a shirt with baby snot smeared on the shoulder. But, at least my hair is done, so I move on with the day. My new normal is stumbling into the baby's dark room in the early morning, seeing her smile from between the bars of her crib, and knowing that that is better than any extra sleep. The mundane and simple have become bright and animated. Look, A RED BLOCK! A YELLOW SIGN! THE NUMBERS ON THE ELEVATOR LIGHT UP!
I knew none of this, sitting there in the hospital room, with the CMA's playing in the background. I didn't know all the wonderful new friends we would make in the year, our wonderful new mom's group friends with their delightful baby boys, our daycare teachers, the other parents at Gymboree. I didn't know how trying a new baby could be on a relationship, while at the same time making this year the best one my husband and I have ever had together. We love our little family of three.
Back then in those late hours of November 10th I knew nothing at all. I lay alone in the dimly lit room in the middle of the city, hand on my belly, with the knowledge that it was all about to begin.
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