There are these little shoes….well, they’re not SHOE shoes, they’re more like moccasins. They’re pricey–twenty-eight bucks–for something a kid is only going to wear for a few months. But all the other babies have them. They’re soft and leathery and don’t have hard soles. This makes them more acceptable because everyone knows that real shoes for babies are kinda silly. In fact, real shoes are suppose to inhibit the baby’s ability to learn how to walk. Stick a pair of leather, heeled, shoes on a kid and their feet becomes walk-less clubs.
Before I knew this, I already felt prejudice against shoes for babies. I always thought they looked weird. Plus, it’s a well known family story that my mother cried the day she bought me my first pair of shoes. I cried too, I hated them! I think I was over a year old and my father described my mother’s anguish: “It meant that you weren’t little anymore, that you would be tied down to the weight of the world and that this was only the beginning.” Or something kind of sweet and hippie like that. At any rate, I felt my mother’s pain but I also developed a healthy shoe addiction as an adult. (My father is to blame). When you’re a size 10 you must seize the opportunity when a cute pair of shoes is on sale–and in stock in your size!
At any rate, I swore that Isaac wouldn’t have baby shoes. Even the little moccasins that EVERY GD baby in Seattle has to have! But I sorta thought that once he reached the walking stage I would break down and buy him the moccasin style shoes–you know, to protect his feet. And then, a woman at play group pointed out that she too had been really anti-shoe until she realized that no amount of socks could keep her baby’s feet warm. Suddenly, I realized she was right! Isaac’s feet are always cold when we go out and it’s because he doesn’t have those little leather shoes!
So…I compromised. I bought him a slightly used pair for seven bucks…and now he’s a total hipster. (They have blue helicopters on them!)
At the 3 month mark; Baby is happier, more entertained, and pulling out of the ‘4th trimester…I am losing my hair. This is normal; something I had been warned about. Last night, piles of my hair came out while I took a shower. “Woah,” I thought, recalling a friend saying she felt like a cancer patient on chemo when her body started shedding all her pre-baby hair. While that sounds awfully dramatic, I was a bit shocked at the sight of so much hair circling the drain.
It’s true that I had started to take my luxurious mane for granted. For the first time in ten years I have hair down to my shoulders. Gone were the many versions of the layered bob I’d been sporting; as soon as pregnancy hit, I celebrated the thickest long hair I’ve ever had, (tied back in a ponytail every damn day, mind you, but I still had it!). Because I can’t seem to get myself to the salon, I’ve been hacking at my bangs with scissors, angling everything upward in a shaggy attempt to look stylishly care free. Now my hair is all over the house, littering my pillow, the laundry, and my son’s mouth.
So much of the baby/pregnancy experience is physically crazy and bizarre. But so much of it I have gotten use to. I’ve gotten use to the strange sensation of nursing, of my weird post-pregnancy body that can’t quite fit into my old clothes, and even the sporadic, interrupted, sleep. But losing my hair is a strange visual. In some ways I relish being one more step closer to my ‘old’ self. The old me never had this hair…it was always thin, stringy, filled with broken ends and limp. The old me is buried somewhere in this post-baby, new mom, body. The old me feels tiny and ignored, a hopeful blip, desperate to return.
Sure, the new me has this really fascinating little person to hang out with all the time. The new me has organized playgroups and connected with a brand new community. The new me is longing for the usual New Mom type of things: sleep, a cry-free existence, and new clothes. But then there’s the old me nipping at my heels…longing for theater and dance…