Parenthood: From joyous laughter to a ruined laptop
Life with a young child, as I’ve written before, can be very up and down. One minute they – and you! - are gleefully happy; the next minute there is crying and yelling and everything feels dark and miserable. This is becoming less the case with Zoe, but Avery (as Q is constantly reminding me) is only two, so we still get a few Jekyll and Hyde moments.
Since Avery is my second, I wasn’t unprepared for this up-and-down stuff – but I still very much enjoyed reading about another mom-blogger’s surprise over what life with a two-year-old is like. She writes:
I knew there’d be Extreme Clichés, like, up all night, vomit-in-your-face clichés, but I figured even that was probably somewhat exaggerated gargoyle-faced lies, just like everything else in the movies/on the Internet/in the lore about parenting.
…
Boy, was I one unicorn-finding idiot. You know how in The Exorcist, the whole possession is super scary and even pretty gross but you know that deep down in there somewhere is that sweet little girl Regan who just wants to cuddle up and be besties? Or like in Poltergeist where they’re all like, “It knows what scares you. It has from the very beginning. Don’t give it any help, it knows too much already.” It’s like that.
A baby, such as my actual baby, might be splashing about in the bath and exclaim, “I got you, bubbles!” and you will all delight in the joy and warmth of parenting and love. And then she might turn around and fling those bubbles directly into your eyes. And then laugh. Maniacally.
…
One time we refilled her cup of milk at snack time and she said “Oh! That’s better!” and we all laughed so joyously and with such earnest truth that it rang into the California mountainside for all the world to hear the purity of our love. And then she dumped the milk onto my laptop.
-M