A Five-Month Retrospective

I kid you not, a couple months ago someone had the audacity to ask an exhausted new mom this profoundly insulting question: So what do you do all day anyway? The exhausted new mom was me, and I was far too flustered, too timorous, too bone-tired to respond.

But, now--five months a mother--I'm catching my breath, building my confidence, and I'm finally ready to bring it. Here's a little Harper's-style Index to keep the clueless more informed (no hard feelings; I was clueless once, too). And to serve as a reminder, long after I forget what it feels like to sleep in broken increments of two hours, why I couldn't put together a respectable sentence about what it was that I did all day.

On any given day of any anonymous week :
Number of diapers changed: 10
Number of diapers that exploded, soiling an entire outfit, the changing table pad, and the front of my shirt, requiring two outfit changes and two loads of laundry: 2
Estimated hours spent breastfeeding: 6
Phone calls made to Ryan, asking him to please come home from work: 3
Number of showers I took: Zero
Hours crying: 3 (Cass); 1.5 (Me)
Ounces of breast milk he drank from a bottle: Zero
Ounces of breast milk poured down sink, after he refused to drink from bottle: 6
Number of times I sang You Are My Sunshine: 17
Average number of times I saved draft of the same email until I could finish and send: 4
Number of times I washed my hands: 14
Days I let The New York Times sit on kitchen table until I put it in recycling bag: 3
Number of photos I took: 5
Likelihood I carried Cass home from a walk in the stroller: 1:3
Meals eaten in less than ten minutes: 3
Meals eaten standing up, with one hand: 2
Afternoon naps I took with Cass to fuel up for the evening: 1
Naps interrupted by Fed-Ex delivery man: 1
Possible life-threatening infant diseases/ailments looked up online: 2
Infant massages administered: 1
Hours rocking, pacing, dancing, bouncing, swinging, carrying, swaying, cradling: 4
Hours Ryan let me sleep in the morning, while he got up with Cass: 2
Hours Cass was an angel in the morning: 2
Phone calls I was forced to let go to voicemail: 8
Phone calls I returned: 1
Thank you cards I wrote: 4
Items from Target I needed: 12
Items from Target that landed in the cart before Cass started crying: 3
Mean looks received in checkout line: 2
Number of times I read Good Night Moon: 3
Odds Cass spit-up after eating: 1:4
Number of projectile vomits: 1
Panic attacks: 3
Number of times I thought I was making a mistake: 73
Number of times I touched his skin against my face: 74
Number of times I held him up to the mirror, looking for signs of myself in his eyes: 2
Hours I felt overwhelmingly responsible for his every breath: 24
Number of times he said thank you: Zero

Cass is five months now, and it's all so different. He still can't say thank you, but he knows his mom and dad. His face lights up with recognition when he sees us--and that's the only thanks I need. We laugh and play, communicating in giggles, hugs and our own special language of raspberry blowing. Being a mom is still hard work, but the pendulum swings in both directions: I could never have known just how much I would love this job of mine. I guess you could say I was clueless.