We've got a stack of clean baby clothes. We've got diapers and a thermometer and baby lotion and two types of baby carriers. I've read a couple of books about child development, and we took a mess of baby preparation classes - Taking Care of Your Baby, Baby Safety, Breastfeeding. The car seat is now properly installed in the back of my baby-friendly station wagon. I've knit a couple baby hats and a sweater, and we have far more store-bought and hand-made baby blankets than any one child not living in northern Alaska could possibly need. Assorted baby gear fills the closet in the former office, soon-to-be nursery. The upholstered glider and the crib are ready to be set up - once the remodeling is done and we can get back into our house, of course. It's snowing here today, a heavy, wet snow, the first snow of the year in the city. We're ready for the colder weather - we have a fleecy little suit for the baby, and at least six hats and a bright red pair of mittens sitting in the stack of things to put away.
It seems like we've got the stuff we need. Most of the lines on my baby stuff checklist have been crossed off. Things aren't all set up yet, which is making me just a wee bit anxious, but, that anxiety aside, I've got a deeper sense that something else isn't quite ready for the baby yet. I've tried to do my getting-ready-for-baby homework. I've read some books and taken some classes and talked with newer moms and grandmas. I've tried to remember babysitting and nannying experiences, and what I learned while working at a daycare with toddlers (Lesson One: Toddlers loooove to play in the sink, especially the lower-height sinks built just for them, regardless of their level of interest in using the other facilities in the bathroom. Lesson Two: Toddlers loooove to take off their clothes and run through the classroom naked, especially when it's time for their parents to show up and wonder what kind of a naked baby daycare their kid is in.).
I've taken all of the steps to be prepared to have this baby, to be a mom. I've seen a lot of parents in action, I've got a bunch of baby and child experience. But no checklist, no book, no class, no countless hours logged watching the baby down the block can really prepare me for the big new world of mommahood. It's me that, despite my longing to meet this baby, isn't quite ready.
On our second anniversary, my husband and I went paragliding. I couldn't wrap my head around skydiving - the whole jumping out of a plane thing was too dramatic and crazy. Jumping off a cliff at 13,000 feet, though, was something I could comprehend. So, the paragliding instructor told us the whole spiel, we snapped into our harnesses, and we got strapped to one of the experienced paragliders for a tandem jump. The instructor spread the bright yellow fabric that would keep us from plummeting to our deaths out behind us, and we waited for the wind to pick up. He told us to lean in to the wind and run, as the chute filled with air and started to lift us off the ground. Until the moment that I was running off of the cliff, my toes scrabbling at the rocky earth, and into the emptiness above a jagged garden of rocks, I'd understood the steps to take to jump off the cliff, but I hadn't really known what it meant to jump off a cliff, to throw myself in the air and weave and dangle above the earth under the colorful parachute, with a mix of fear and joy and awe. Once we were floating, I couldn't stop laughing in amazement - despite gravity and pesky things like our lack of wings, we dipped and soared far above the mountain town and hills below.
The first leap into motherhood must be like jumping and floating off of that cliff. I have all the gear; I have the basic information. But I feel like I won't understand it, and won't know what to do, until I'm deep in it, until the baby is out of my belly and in my arms, perhaps months after we've settled back in our house, surrounded by the gear and the books and the piles of blankets. And even then, there will be new developments every day, and new cliffs to jump off.
