Mamamama Jellyfish

Mamamama Jellyfish.

I use to read Nietzsche. Dostoyevsky. Hemmingway. Now I’m Mamamama Jellyfish.

When my mom dropped my son off as I was returning from work, we discussed the fact that he had a legitimate poop. You know, not a soft pile of mush – a real shit! Fully formed! Yep. Oft, we sit around the table, discussing the size, number and quantity of my son’s feces.

 I’ve developed two semi permanently dislocated shoulders, leaving me with the reach and physical resemblance to an orangutan. Take that for evolution, Darwin, you magnificently bearded bastard. Which, speaking of evolution, will probably be the next hipster trend after the man bun loses steam. I can also thank my parental duties for giving me an hourglass figure—the caveat being that the hourglass shape is my spine. Fortunately I’m not the only one who has suffered disfigurement. My husband is rapidly losing his ability to walk upright, with a kyphosis-like gate I lovingly call “the hunch”.  But I look at him, sitting on the couch with his neck extended like a Canadian goose in flight from wearing our son on his head and I think, “damn, I love that man.”

And while I’ve always rocked a rather bohemian style, I never went full hippie with armpit hair down to my elbows until my son was born. Yes, the other day I looked at my pits in the shower, shaved and promptly apologized to my husband –who, despite being the most observant person I have ever met, wisely lied to me and said he “didn’t notice”. He’s a keeper.

But I’ve picked up a lot of skills in my first year as a parent. I now feel confident I could wrestle an alligator (maybe a stuffed alligator), I am unphased by scents that would make even the most stoic of sniffers gag, and I’ve honed my booger plucking aptitude to a .5 second grab. That’s like a millennium falcon doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.  Which is also about how long it now takes me eat and do my makeup, combined.

Yes, it’s been a blur. But I sitting across the dinner table from baby boy, watching the devil-may-care smile creeping across his face as he ever so slowly as he takes his food and drops it over the edge of his highchair, I am filled with a love that I never could have imagined. Laughing when he laughs, discovering the world again anew, and watching him turn into a person has been a peak experience to say the least.

There has been a lot of stress. So much that the crushing weight has kept me from sleep, even when I’ve only had about two hours of it in two days. The lack of post-natal protection for mothers left me out of a job after FMLA was over because no accommodations could be made for me at work (my shift was until 7, and nearly all daycares close at 6-6:30 around here). About two weeks after that, my husband was laid off from his job and his take home pay was cut in half. My parents have helped us out a lot, and I don’t know where we would be without them. But we kept smiling, and kept laughing, and insulated our son from all the worries of adulthood with games of hide-and-seek, story time, and dancing. Lots of dancing. Baby jellyfish loves to dance with his whole body, shaking his head, hands and feet and galloping around on the ground to the tune of just about anything.

As we turn the page of a new year, I can’t wait to see what it will bring. New disfigurements, increased sprinting abilities, and impossible explanations that “daddy can use those words but you can’t”. Take a deep breath, Mama Jellyfish. You have a toddler on your hands, now.

Oh – and how did I get to be Mamamama Jellyfish? Pure exhaustion, laying on the floor with my son on my chest, sliding around on the ground saying Mamamama Jellyfish. Yep. That’s what I’ve become.

 Baby Jellyfish. & Mama Jellyfish.