Mommysense

It’s been about 2 years since I’ve had a decent night’s sleep. The minute my son was born I developed “mommysense”. Okay, maybe not the minute he was born.

 There was that one incident Fresh off of 29.5 hours of induced labor that went nowhere, and then straight into a C-Section, I was groggy and in pain. Barely able to stand up, the nurses shot me full of Vicodin and some other meds I can’t recall. Hobbling down the hallway I was determined to go see my newborn son in the nursery. When I arrived what felt like 20 minutes later, I showed the nurses my bracelet ID, they smiled and told me to go ahead and pick up my son. I reach down and hear “Not that one!” Holy sh*t! I had tried to pick up the wrong baby! Sure, I was pretty doped up, but shouldn’t a mother just know her own child? The nurses looked at me, pity on their faces. “Why don’t you go back to your room, dear, and we’ll bring him to you?” I left, feeling like a failure as a mother, and sure the conversation after I left went something like this:

Nurse 1: Damn, she tried to pick up the wrong BABY!

Nurse 2: Let’s hope her son never goes through a dramatic growth spurt. She’ll never recognize him!

That first night the nurses told me to get some sleep and let them take care of Kirill. They said I needed the rest before I was discharged. After the mistaken-baby incident, I was like, “Whatever you say, nurses. Oh, and will you come home with me too? I obviously don’t know how to parent.”

Alas, it was not to be. A few hours later one of the nurses came in, a sour expression on her face. “We need to leave your son with you tonight. He’s crying non-stop and is keeping all the other babies up!” Kicked out of the nursery after only a few hours of life that’s my boy! Way to be an individual. I loved this little guy more and more as his instant personality showed.

So in comes Kirill, as sweet as can be. Every time I held him with me in bed he slept soundly. When I went to put him in the little bassinette he screamed bloody murder. And that’s the moment when my mommysense kicked in. I had a baby who was a snuggler. He wanted to be held as much as possible, even while sleeping. So I held him. For his first year of his life.

Fast forward to present day. How exactly did mommysense change me? Even now I wake up at the slightest sound that Kirill makes, whose room is quite a distance from ours. If he is having a bad dream, I’m there before he wakes up. If he’s having stomach pain (I have one gassy child) I’m there in a heartbeat. When he says, “Mama I’m out of bed before he can even expect a response. It also means I haven’t slept in 2 years. On the rare, rare occurrence he would stay overnight with a grandparent, I would still find myself waking up, listening for him. Some nights I really want to turn off my mommysense. But then there’s that night. The night when he has a bad dream, and I’m there in an instant telling him everything is okay. He wakes up, smiles, tells me, “I love you Mama. Cars and trucks too.” Then he drifts off to sweet dreams, snoring soundly. It’s one in the morning. It will take me two hours to get back to sleep. But this early morning, I am a hero and saved the day. Wish those nurses could see me now.