The first night at home with my little man (yes, baby #2 has arrived!), he woke in the middle of the night, and suddenly acted very alert while I changed his diaper. He stopped crying and looked around in wonder as if to ask, “Where the heck am I now?!”
I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to process so much change at once. Suddenly he’s in this world of all sorts of people (many voices of whom he recognized, I hope), and all these different sounds and colors, although I know newborns can’t quite see those yet. Still, it’s got to be a jarring experience.
But with the events of the last week, I think that’s what change so often is: jarring. Especially when you’re not ready for it.
As I’ve shared before, we’d been prepping Little Miss for Little Man’s arrival for MONTHS. But even that change has been hard for her. The first night we were home, she took a look at my belly, pointed at it and said, “Put him back in.”
She wasn’t used to not being the center of attention, or having to wait for me to do something for her. Even harder was the fact that I still can’t pick her up as I recover from labor. There have been moments she didn’t know where I was (and we don’t live in a very big apartment), and she started crying; once she found me, she insisted on being held. Everything changed for her all at once, and a week later, she’s still very much processing it.
Change is hard. But it’s most especially hard when you’re really and truly not ready for it, when it comes out of nowhere. One of the most jarring things in my family’s lives lately was a death in our family.
My youngest sister lost the love of her life about two weeks ago in a car accident — a terrible case of the wrong place at the wrong time — and her world is forever changed. I can’t even begin to fathom everything she’s been feeling since it happened. It’s not fair, and it’s not right. I don’t think anything I write about that will help, nor will it make any sense of what happened.
I guess that’s a part of what change is too: change doesn’t wait for us. It happens, whether we’re ready or not.
That doesn’t sound all that comforting, and I honestly didn’t mean for this post to be such a downer. But with everything that’s happened in the past two weeks — all the huge mix of crazy emotions, from soaring highs to the sadness that comes with losing someone — I keep thinking about change, and how it can descend on us in the most unexpected ways.
The only thing we can do, I think — and only to some extent — is to ride that wave of change. Allow the feelings and emotions to come.
Know that it’s okay to ask for help if you need it… and please know that you’re not alone.
To end on a tad bit more of a hopeful note, change will always be a constant. It’s a part of life, and that somehow, somewhere, that “change” will eventually feel normal, even if it doesn’t feel that way quite yet.
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