Baby Finn

I’ve recently noticed that I’ve developed a habit of calling Finn: ‘Baby Finn.’  I also am still referring to him as ‘the baby.’ He’s almost two.  I’m not sure why I do it.  Maybe it’s because I’m desperate to hold on to his babyhood for as long as I can.  Maybe it’s because it just seems like a few moments ago that I was holding his chubby baby body and looking down at his sweet little face for the first time.  But as he’s almost half my height and wearing clothes sized for a 3-and-a-half year old it’s come to a juncture where I can no longer feasibly call him ‘Baby Finn.’  Sooner or later I’m going to have to reign in my language and start calling him ‘Finn.’ 

I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it…

Suddenly I have some sympathy for those women who keep breastfeeding their kids till the age of five. “I just don’t know how to stop.” One of them confided in me once.  Well goodness.

The other day BB and I were at a restaurant and I heard the woman on the table next to ours say to the waiter: “And can we also get a glass of milk for the baby.” I swung my head around, eager to get a look at the cute little ‘baby’ but sat there was nothing but a  long legged six-year-old girl punching her older brother in the arm.  I kept a slight eye on the family for the rest of the meal.  No ‘baby’ showed itself at any time.  However when the glass of milk arrived the six year old stuck a straw in it and sucked down the whole thing. 

If I’m still calling Finn ‘Baby Finn’ by the time he’s out of diapers can someone please take me aside and have a word…

I am NOT…

…Worn down to an insignificant crisp of a woman by motherhood.  And I don’t see the few mother friends I know worn down to a nub of blubbering insignificance by it either…  So what’s with the media and film world portraying us as world weary, brain dead, non sexual, emotionally scattered zombies?  Just a question.  I recently watched ‘Motherhood’ staring Uma Thurman.  Yes she was living in a walk up in Greenwich village, yes she had one more child than I do, yes she had a pretty useless husband and yes an incontinent dog too but – really?  This woman was behaving as if she was permanently one step away from a full-scale torrid sweaty meltdown.   Watch the film – this woman has been driven to the edge of mania by her two seemingly well-behaved and quite cute children and I really don’t know why.

My thought is that when women fall mentally into a thousand pieces like that – I don’t blame it on their being mothers at all.  I blame it on the crazy lives they have been pushed into living.  I know when I reach the Motherhood Wall it’s not really Finn that’s sent me there – it’s because of financial pressure, or the shitty day at work, or the prick who nearly killed us both on the freeway, because the neighbor is blaring Ariba Ariba music again, or because something just didn’t go the way I wanted it to.