Recalculating

So quite by accident this morning a friend of mine inquires about how we're coping with the 18 month sleep regression. Wait, what? We've only recently emerged from the tunnel of sleep deprivation into the light and now there's another underground on the horizon? Dammit. I think what irks me more about this potential dark in the near distance is that (of all the many things I unearth to worry about) I completely missed this one.

When my son was born (for the sake of anonymity lets call him baby "C") I felt over prepared in the wake of everything I'd read about what to expect when you're pregant (*bad*), birthing (*badder*) and finally parenting (*disaster*). The name of the game was essentially "expect the worst" but, hey, it's all worth it in the end. I was on board with that but so neurotically awaiting each crisis that I started manifesting them. My  husband is all too happy to regale you with the story of how our obstetrician remarked about how short C's femurs appeared in our third trimester ultrasound that I raced home to bone up on dwarfism. Suffice it to say that C is perfectly sized.

It became clear early on that my own anxiety was trumping the benefit of all of this acquired knowledge (I began deferring to "Dr. Google" for everything from pimples to poop and developed an expertise in preemptively diagnosing our poor son with a host of maladies when they almost always amounted to gas, teething or general 'newborn-ness'). So I ditched the books, confident that I would march forward as a competent parent no longer diverted by worry inducing medical mumbo jumbo. I think, more rightly, I just wanted to hunker down in ignorance (a la Plato's Allegory of the Cave), content to acknowledge the shadows without having to identify the truth behind their shape. At least, that's what I'm thinking now in light of this whole 18 month sleep regression debacle. Apparently the "What to Expect" franchise extended past the first year - so I find myself in unfamiliar territory. Which of course translates roughly into blind panic. PANIC! But rather than engaging that part of me that always seems to succeed in conjuring up the worst case scenarios (I graduated from college the Salutatorian of Worry of my class - huzzah!) this time I choose sanity. Sadly, my GPS does not recognize the destination for "Successful Parentville" - and I suspect if it did, unforeseen jags in the road (hello off-ramp to 18 month sleep deprivation regression) would yield a whole hell of a lot of recalculating, recalculating...

Kid, you'll move mountains...

To date I've read the book "Oh, the Places You'll Go" to my son at least ten times while he toddles about his bedroom, engaged in far more interesting activities like dismantling his bookshelf, distributing his stuffed animal brigade one by one to the far corners of his room and implores me to play a modified game of hide and seek around the barred perimeter of his crib. So, at this point, I'm fairly confident that I'm getting more out of the book than he is. This is a glimpse into the bedtime happenings in our household where I know, at the hurried age of seventeen months, I should have picked "Goodnight Moon" but didn't in favor of reciting some encouraging Seussian truisms about life. Bedtime, like everything else in our lives, has its share of imperfections. Case in point - the copy of the book I'm reading from is stained and brittle along the edges from being doused with dog pee of all things. Still, it retains some sentimental value (a college graduation gift - nothing says "most likely to succeed" like dog pee) so I've kept it.

Nothing's perfect. Certainly not me - and it's been a long process of accepting that I fall tragically short of being the perfect wife or mother, having the perfect job or body or being more than a slim line above crazy. But, hey, those shortcomings keep life interesting (so says the crazy lady yapping about her messy life to the public unknown).  So here it is, no agenda or objective, in medias res of my little story.