Gee you turn your back for 5 seconds (or 9 days) and Diaryland gets all serious and black and white on you. When it first flashed up, I was sure the site was dead and my last five recorded years vanished. Must - move - to - Blogger.

I already told you the good news about being a Mom - your essential self does not change. Now here I am to tell you the bad news about being a Mom - your essential self does not change. I was kind of hoping some nicer, selfless self would emerge with the placenta - but no, not really. I am admittedly the most impatient person you ever met. Woe is you if you do not follow the "rules of the sidewalk" and take up both the left and the right - I will curse you out under my breath. I have a hair trigger temper, just like my Dad, which is unfortunately the reason that we weren't always fond of my Dad. He could explode violently for very little reason and five minutes later, act like nothing had happened. Despite hating this trait, I have it and wrestle with it daily. I am terrible terrible terrible with authority, alternately kowtowing to it and resenting every small request that "authority" asks of me. Especially authority that I don't feel have much right but uses their authority to the hilt. As a result, I am known to be very very snippy with border guards and airport security, which is just lame and embarrasses the hell out of AH. But often I can't stop myself, no matter how much I want to. I function terribly without concrete goals and aspirations and a daily sense of accomplishment. Even the most random walk or bike ride must have a presumed goal at the end of it, a task or place or errand to complete. This isn't to say I can't be spontaneous but I have to start out with a goal. Other faults: I like people to be self-sufficient, I guess because I consider myself to be so and can't figure out why others aren't(please don't mention that this makes me unsuitable for being a librarian whose whole deal is to help those who need help and aren't "self-sufficient" - I KNOW and I'm honestly trying to work on this).
These traits add up to a perfect storm of crappiness when parenting an infant, it seems. Especially my rather serious and oft-crabby daughter. A woman from work who had a baby around the same time I did came for a visit yesterday and the contrast was shocking: her baby was round and chubby and pale pale redhead blue-eyed and happy happy happy smiling giggling guy. In comparison my tiny olive skinned serious frowning girl just seemed so - un-babylike. Wringing a smile from her is a rare and delightful event. Most of the time we just don't want her to cry. 24 hours a day my goal and job is distracting her from crying. All day every day distraction. No goal or purpose but stopping the crying. No teachable moments or reading together or playing with toys. Just stopping the crying. My authority figure is a 21 inch girl in rubber pants with a big set of lungs. And sometimes I resent her and I can be heard swearing under my breath. Sometimes louder. My temper will leap out of nowhere, like this morning before sunrise, when she had been up since 3 am feeding and crying until here it was 5 am, time to feed again and we did that for an hour and she was still crying and wouldn't sleep and I just lost it and woke AH and handed her roughly to him and pulled the blankets over my head. Like I was three years old. I long to do more than just simply distract and keep clean and feed her. And whine about it here.
At least she is progessing - we have small achievements every day, a sense she is learning. I would obviously (see above bad traits) be the worlds worst adult caregiver. In one of my latest Nursing with Netflix installments, I watched "Away From Her", a thoroughly Canadian film that referenced one of my favourite love poems (The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje), played some of my favourite Neil Young songs, all in a script based on one of my favourite writers, Alice Munro, and directed by Sarah Polley who is an interesting actress and also happened to star in an off-shoot of "Anne of Green Gables", one of my absolute favourite kids book series. so what wasn't to like? But it involved Alzheimers, caring for someone who got progressively more helpless rather than gaining competence day by day. I don't know, especially after the last two months, if I could do that. At least not well. Which reminds me again how un-awesome I am.
Despite all my obvious failings, a very favourite blogger and real-life friend gave me a little E shout-out the other day and so I thank her. I am supposed to respond in kind and I will, when I can make a thoughtful list. Suffice to say, if you have ever received a comment from me of any kind, you are likely a Very Important Blogger to me. I do not comment as much as I should. I dole out my internet love as stingily as my daughter doles out smiles. But it is always sincere, and if I'm moved to write, trust me, I consider you a kind of part of my real life, as creepy as that sounds. It turns out I treat the internet like I have always treated my real life - I much prefer a select group of amazing people as friends over a big rag tag group of acquaintances. I am so not made for these times.