The Language of Perpetual Interruption
Over the weekend we celebrated my grandpa's 90 years of life together as a family. This means almost all of my 15 cousins, aunts and uncles came together with a combine total of 35 people and 3 little ones, including Charlotte. I absolutely love visiting with my family and catching up on their lives. This is not what it looks like, however, when you have a baby that is mobile. We have reached the phase of broken conversations: I’ll be right back, sorry we have to go, sorry, sorry, sorry. We will never be able to participate in the same way and you can only ever be half listening. This is an entirely new form of conversational ping pong and it is exhausting.
It wasn’t until I had my mommy group over on Monday and we were all together in Charlotte’s playroom that I was truly able to “visit” with anyone. But this was only because we were all speaking the exact same language: You never start a story over, you laugh at yourself and how ill equipped you feel to be in charge of another human life, and you never, ever need to apologize. It is the forgivable language of perpetual interruption that mommies are fluent in from the moment their baby is born. If you get through a whole story without your child stealing a toy, rooting through another baby’s diaper bag for novel treats and car keys, or toddling into a danger zone, you do a mini victory dance in your head and just hope it was a good enough story that perhaps even got a laugh. This is the new version of “adult conversation”. When they say that your child becomes the center of your universe, they are not kidding. You sit in a circle with your babies in the middle like a buffered mush pot and all talk around them and yet always about them. My most important piece of advice is this: recognize that this is your new form of communication, let go of the guilt associated with it and accept that you will barely complete a thought let alone a