The moments where I pat myself on the back for being a good mother are fewer and more far between (far betweener?) than they should be. But I felt like a genius in Ikea.
This is not unusual, actually. I often feel like a genius in Ikea. Meandering through the showroom gives me a distinct feeling of cleverness--"hey, these little canisters would be perfect for the kitchen"--despite the fact that each of the "rooms" is set up to showcase exactly the thing that I feel I've discovered. And despite the fact that the furniture looks much less cheap and particle-boardy in the store. Somehow, I can get past the clever marketing of it all, and still enjoy the sense of having found the perfect solution to a real or imagined interior design problem.
Westley also seemed to enjoy Ikea for the first hour or so. The few from the stroller was enough to fascinate him until he remembered that he was due for a nap. He faces me in the stroller, and I watched as his face scrunched up several times, fighting sleep. Sleeping, after all, would keep him from realizing that two birch end tables could be pushed together to create a smallish coffee table that would be the perfect size for our living room. His eyelids would close for a minute, and then pop open again suddenly, and he'd look up at me like, "What the hell, woman?
I swayed the stroller back and forth for a minute, waiting for a Westley-style meltdown, before noticing the hum of the refrigerator in the grocery section. I put the stroller beside the cold case. Westley dropped off to sleep in all of thirty seconds--a sweetly sleeping cherub next to the frozen Swedish meatballs.
"I don't know what to do" was a kind of mantra in the first few weeks of Westley's life. Because, right then, I really didn't know what to do. I had never dealt with a tiny baby before. It was like living with an alien. But even though we've had a chance to get acquainted, I can still fall into the trap of despairing because I can't read Westley's mind and give him exactly what he wants. Or whatever it is that Perfect Mothers are supposed to be able to do.
The negative thinking stops now. Because, as it turns out, sometimes I do know what to do. And when I don't know what to do, I can still figure out that no white noise machine is a match for an industrial fridge. And that's worth something.
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