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Monday, March 08, 2010

R is for Relief

As I said in my last post, my mother came out for Baby E and is now gone. We were sad to see her go for many reasons, not least of which was she came and she cleaned our house from top to bottom. I mean it: there was nowhere she didn't tackle, from piles of laundry to the abyss of my office to the kitchen drawers to everywhere in between. With her encouragement, we took loads and loads and LOADS of things to Goodwill, turned our food storage boxes into end tables in the living room and stored the rest in an unused cabinet in the bathroom, refurnished our bathroom to maximize space, finally set up my sewing machine in the newly cleaned and organized office, learned how to use said sewing machine, got rid of my infernal maternity clothes, finally divested ourselves of our unused television set, came up with a plan for the guest room/nursery, took away all the orphaned food storage containers cluttering my shelves, reorganized closets, ironed heaps of shirts for the husband, and the list goes on and on and on. And all this with a new baby in the house, but none of it felt overwhelming because of her herculean efforts. Our house seems bigger and better even with a new addition, and it's all because of her.

She was also saintly and would take the baby in the mornings after his early feeding (somewhere between 3 and 6 am) so I could sleep a few hours in between feedings. This was heavenly for me and made this first week bearable, though I missed her sorely the first morning I was on my own again. Last time, when I had J, I felt completely terrified when my mother left and the husband went back to work. This time, I just felt sad, which I consider a move in the right direction. How to do you spell relief? M-O-M!

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