New Mom Vocab 101

One of the surprising things about new mommy-hood has been the major impairment to brain function. Words, especially, I have a hard time remembering and often have to trail off at the end of a sentence or take long grasping pauses in the middle as I rack my brain for the right utterance. However, two words I've noticed have had an especially recurrent presence in my mind over the first couple of months of motherhood: Please and Fudge - Fudge as in "Fudge! The fudgin' baby is fudgin' crying a-fudgin'-gain!" (okay, so it's not always fudge, but you get my drift).
Motherhood brings with it many emotions and one of the less-mentioned ones is anger. Blame it on lack of sleep, feelings of ineptitude, or the neediness of new babies, but yes, I have been irrationally angry at my cute little bundles of joy. To blow off this anger, I will stomp around the house, throw things and shout "Fudge!" over and over in my head like a mantra.


Please enters the picture in another less-mentioned time of new motherhood: desperation. "Please eat," or "Please don't cry" or most often "Please go to sleep." In those times of extreme desperation, often during those sudden interruptions of much-needed sleep where you wake up too tired to even know what to ask for, you stumble out of bed with that one word resonating through your brain. Please. Please. Please.

Lately, I have a new favorite thing that the girls do. When I'm feeding them or rocking them to sleep or otherwise cradling them across the front of me, they'll occasionally stretch out their arm and reach up with supreme concentration to press their splayed hand against my cheek. It's like they're reassuring me, "It's okay, Mom. You're doing just fine." In these times, in these memory-erasing moments, there are no words.