Why I Made Cupcakes Yesterday

I went back and looked to see what I was doing at this time last year and behold I was eating cupcakes, newly on maternity leave, hauling around my extra girth and begging my toddler to not want to swing at the playground because I couldn’t lift him in.

That started me thinking about the best advice I was given in those weeks before Fresco was born. I got lots of good advice and lots of no advice at all, just sympathy, and it was all appreciated. But my wise friend mo-wo said to me something like, stop thinking about labour already and just enjoy the last two weeks with your first born because they won’t come again.

So I did.

I have thought many times in the past year about the last day that Trombone and I spent together, just us. It was the Thursday before Fresco was born. That Friday I had my last doctor’s appointment and Trombone spent the day at his grandparents. Saturday Saint Aardvark was home and Saturday night I went into labour.

The Thursday before Fresco was born, I took Trombone to Wal-Mart and bought a big box of baby wipes, the last thing on my list of things to buy. I bought a box of vegetable crackers and us each a pair of sunglasses because the sun was out that day. Mine were my usual big, black, bee-woman style. His were Go Diego Go! and he wore them faithfully all summer. I also bought him a two-pack of Winnie the Pooh sippy cups because he seemed to love them. And it felt good to see that look of brief glee on his face at getting something he wanted.

Then we went on to a park I thought he would like. It had ducks. He didn’t care too much about the ducks. He was sort of into climbing on playground equipment at the time. There was a small climbing structure and he tried to climb it but it was slippery with dew so he fell and bumped himself and he cried. He was tired that day. We came home and had lunch and naps. Then he watched some tv and I let him watch an extra half hour or so. We ate cookies with chocolate.

I felt, all day, what if this is our last day. What if I have the baby this weekend? Of course I was really hoping I would and I knew I was going to have my membranes swept the next day so there was a good chance, but mostly I was just torturing myself with the delicious knowledge that this was it. Our lives together were going to change soon and I wanted to have the time to just stare at him, watching him eat a chocolate cookie. It was his first chocolate cookie. It took him a full half hour to eat. An entire episode of “In the Night Garden.”

I don’t remember how I felt, physically. I was big and heavy and cumbersome and tired and cranky; I only know this because it is well documented. But I remember how I felt watching my Trombone frolic in the park, still figuring out his feet beneath him, poking in and out of bushes, stomping in puddles. Blond hair shining in the sunlight, orange sweater hanging from his shoulders. He was exquisite.

It feels like the time since then has passed in an instant, though, again, the documentation suggests otherwise. Over the year, Trombone has learned to be himself, to be a brother, to be a sibling, to be someone apart from me. He does not always cry when he falls. It takes him considerably less time to eat a chocolate cookie. I remember that day as the last slow, lazy day we shared; our expectations of each other low, our love for each other unquestioned. I am sad that I have not felt exactly like that again since.

But I also do not feel sad. Our relationship has deepened, widened. He is not a baby anymore, he is a boy, running away from me, looking over his shoulder. It is as it should be. That day feels like our goodbye hug; goodbye before we walk through this gate together to become a different kind of family.

So I repeat my best advice to any of you expecting a second child. Drink in those moments with your first. Labour will last one or two days and then it will be over. The rest of your life will start again when that baby is born and it will not stop, will not slow, even as you beg it to. Now is the slow time, now when your body forces you to sit on the couch and eat chocolate cookies. Might as well.