It’s Because of the Movies.
It’s 6 a.m. My eyes are closed and I hear “AAAEEEE,” followed by a crystal-clear laugh.
I open my eyes and, of course, there’s a small face five centimeters away from mine, looking at me and laughing the second our eyes meet.
From the moment he wakes up, it starts: papappapa, bye, ari, siri, daddy, mama, dede, water.
And he laughs.
And if I don’t hear him screaming with excitement or laughing, he’s definitely tinkering with something he shouldn’t.
There’s music playing nonstop in the house, because he loves it. He dances to it.
There’s laughter and shouting. Frustration and joy.
More energy than a Tesla needs to recharge.
And maybe that’s why, right now, I found myself going back one year.
Before I ever held him in my arms, I thought that once I gave birth, I would know exactly what to do.
That instinct would kick in. Clearly. Automatically.
But I have never felt more unprepared than I did that day.
I looked at him, so small and so completely dependent on me.
I looked at myself, exhausted and split in two.
Every time I got out of bed to go to the bathroom after the C-section, it felt like I was losing everything inside me.
And I said: fuck.
Where is the instruction manual?
In the hospital, even though it was shocking and hard, I had an entire army of people taking care of me and R.
When we got home, that’s when I tasted real despair.
The army disappeared.
The heavy silence appeared.
All you could hear was the sterilizer and the front door opening and closing every day, sometimes twice a day.
Not with people rushing in to help, but with my husband, going out to buy things we never thought we’d need before holding R in our arms for real.
The first night at home, we thought we were staying afloat.
But we both remember it as if it were yesterday.
Me, at the foot of the bed, lying perpendicular, propped up on two pillows, with cold compresses on my chest because it felt like it was going to explode.
Him, lying diagonally, dozing off and waking up even more often than R, checking on him, then on me.
No one was holding me.
Everything hurt.
I was cold.
It wasn’t that moment where you hug each other and watch a beautiful baby sleep.
Even though the baby was there, we were in a completely different movie.
In the morning I woke up without feeling like I had slept,
even though, taking turns, we surely had.
He was there. Pale and blond, with red lips and very small eyes wide open.
He wasn’t crying. He was cooing.
And I said:
Oh God. That was just the first night. What do I do with the rest?
That’s when I picked him up.
I felt his warmth and his breath on my neck.
And I said:
okay.
There is no version of this world in which I let him down.
I have to pull myself together and perform.
At nine months, he started saying mama.
Then daddy.
Then water.
And then… nothing.
Why?
Because every time he said something, I launched into the entire repertoire and more.
I named everything I saw.
I made all the animal sounds from the farm and the jungle.
I exhausted him.
He probably thought: this woman loses her mind every time I talk, better to stay quiet. 🙂
I only realized this now, when he started talking again.
Because now I don’t do anything spectacular.
I repeat what he says.
I clap.
I softly sing his words.
And the door to speech opened again.
He has control.
He chooses when to add something new.
He chooses when he needs time to let things settle.
We’ll see how many words we have by 13 months.
Maybe the obsession of the first year doesn’t disappear, but slowly turns into trust, while he transforms from a completely foreign language into a mother tongue.
This article was written as one page of the baby instruction manual for the first year with a new born — the one built from real days, real nights, and real uncertainty.
