This is two

Owen is two now. Twenty-seven months, if I’m being excessive. Eight-hundred and thirty-one days, if I look at the app that tracks such things. OF COURSE I KEEP TRACK OF SUCH THINGS. How else would I know that Todd and I have been married for 936 days? Or that our first date was 1,341 days ago?

We lived in blessed times.

So, here we are. In the thick of toddler. I wrote diligently through my pregnancy. Less so through Owen’s first year, but nothing for his entire second year. One day when I look back at my entries I’ll wonder what happened here, during these months of two. But I feel like that’s self-explanatory. My son is two. What else is there to know? Have you ever had a 2-year-old? I don’t know where the time went either.

I like to think 2019 was my rebuilding year, which was supposed to be 2018, which was supposed to be 2017. But finally — finally — I got some semblance of self in 2019. It took an entire year-plus of motherhood to crawl from the fog. It was such a thick fog. I honestly didn’t see the murkiness while I was in it. Only once I got out.

And now I look back and wonder how moms do it. Over and over. I feel like I did a good job, but there are so many things I wish I’d known or would do differently, if I had another chance at that first year. Even the first two years. But if I were to swallow a truth serum and spit out my first thought, it’d be that I don’t want to do it again.

I am obsessed with Owen. He is the very best person. I cannot — truly and fully — imagine a life where he does not exist. The mental load of that first year was a lot of work. I spent a lot of time anxious. Too anxious. I hated my job at the time. I dug myself into a hole of absolute despair about it, resenting everything that stood between me and literally anything else. I sort of hate that, too. That I spent the first year of Owen’s life in a spiral of despair, going to a job that crushed my soul. Feeling torn from Owen every single day just so I could pull in a paycheck.

That anxiety kept me holed up for too long. I was nervous to leave the house — with or without him. My running suffered because of it. My sanity suffered because of it. And now, looking back, I wonder if Owen suffered because of it.

I reached out to Owen’s pediatrician last week to discuss a referral for early intervention speech therapy. Owen’s always been pretty vocal. In the last year, he’s had a handful of solid words that ebbed and flowed in his vocabulary, but never stuck. Mama, dada, kitty, go, no, up. But as suddenly as they’d show up, allowing us to marvel at his newfound prowess, they’d disappear. He doesn’t say kitty anymore. He knows who the kitty is, but he doesn’t say it. The same goes for mama and dada. Up. All of them.

In the place of decipherable words, he babbles. Entire conversations in his charming and incoherent toddler language. He’s so expressive. He knows exactly what he’s saying. We, however, do not. We can absolutely communicate with him. He understands what we ask of him. It’s just that we’ve learned his gestures and babbles and needs without him having to tell them to us with actual English, aside from his small and trusty catalogue of words.

So now is the part where the mom guilt sets in. Did I keep us inside too much? Did we not get out enough? Did we not talk to him enough? Did we not read to him enough? Did I do this with my raging new mom anxiety?

Owen didn’t do more than army crawl until after his first birthday. He was late to sit up. He didn’t walk until he was well past a year-and-a-half. Sure, he showed up a month early, but I’ve been awaiting his milestones on pins and needles ever since, always anxious. And here I am again, wondering if something I lacked as a mother has kept him from learning what he’s supposed to learn.

So this is motherhood for me two years in. I peacefully mourn the days when Owen was so small he fit perfectly on my shoulder and into the crook of my neck while he slept. But I’m so enamored by him every single day now that I don’t know how my soul can possibly expand any further as that love grows daily. And I’m simultaneously terrified of milestones and stages to come.

Something tells me this is how it always is.