Love Baby So Much

by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

Well, our son and heir is home for spring break, with all his electronic gizmos. There was a pretty good chance that we were going to have a new little ... very little ... sister or brother for him when he got here, but so far, it hasn’t happened. I am now told it might be a few weeks. In anticipation of that blessed event, however, I posted a few baby needs on freecycle and three wonderful folks emailed me back. One offer of assistance came from the diaper service people over in Rockland. I had called them to ask about prices and so on, and when she saw my appeal in freecycle, she wrote back to me. Another lady emailed me and told me she had a few things, and a few things more from her sister who had had twins. Could I pick them up on Sunday?

So I headed up to Washington on Sunday after Meet the Press and picked up many, many wonderful items, including a baby swing and a bassinet, and a lot of newborn clothing. Carrie also gave me a ‘new mother’ gift, a candle and a bar of scented soap, which was really sweet. But I am not a new mother yet. I am still an old mother.

When I got all the stuff home, it was snowing, and Tristan helped me wrangle it all inside. We put it all in the library for now. But still no infant.

I had a hard time settling down to housework after seeing how much space a tiny infant’s belongings take up in what is undeniably the largest room in the house. I sat down with a pad of paper to write the Housekeeping List - it doesn’t vary dramatically from week to week, but I write one anyway to psych myself up for it. We hadn’t done much for a couple of weeks, and the house looked it. Dust lay on every surface. Bits of dog biscuits cuddled up next to the rug. I looked down at the coffee table in the living room and saw my son’s tiny blue laptop, plugged into a distant outlet (creating a tripwire for the unwary), next to his used copy of On Being and Nothingness and his pouch of shag tobacco, and realized the magnitude of what we were taking on. One young person about to be launched with habits both good and bad, and perhaps another young person at the very beginning of life with no habits at all, and it would be another 20 years before there is a tiny pink laptop and a used copy of something or other on the coffee table. It could be another blue laptop. I don’t know yet.

So I moved the laptop over to the window seat where it wouldn’t trip anyone and put the tobacco up high somewhere. Sartre got to stay where he was. For now. One has to get into good habits.

I did some sweeping and surface dusting and laundry (including 20 adorable little newborn sleepers) and realized that I was looking at the task differently. Sharp bits of dog bones got thrown away over Rudie the Dog’s objections. Bits of fluff that might go into a baby’s mouth and choke her were jettisoned. I was cleaning from the floor upward.

That seemed familiar, but distant. The last time I recall doing that sort of cleaning was when Tristan was little, and our baby care class instructor encouraged us to get down on the ground and ‘see what the baby could see’. What we saw when we did this was actually pretty nauseating, so as soon as our son and heir was beyond the toddler years, we never did it again. And it was much easier to do it at 25 than it is now, for sure.

And now, here I was, finding tufts of cat fur and coffee beans and those plastic meeting pins that introduce one at conferences and lost raisins and aspirins and mummified baby carrots under things I hadn’t checked since we moved into Turning Tide Cottage.

Where does all this junk come from? If I had been asked, I would have said my home was fairly tidy (though not organized) most of the time. But not, apparently, from the baby’s-eye-view.

I am self-aware enough to know that I am, in the parlance of impending motherhood, ‘nesting’. But there is really nothing that can be done about it. I’d like to claim it’s hormonal, that catch-all explanation for all strangeness of the female persuasion, but in my case, that can’t be the rationale. I think the thought of a new baby makes most women a little soft in the head. And when that happens, cleaning is a thing that you can do without a lot of thinking.

And no matter how it is that the baby arrives, nature wants us not to think too hard around him or her, because otherwise, we might start questioning our sanity and not do it again.