After my mother left things became a little more complicated. She wasn’t there to run the show and check up on me. I learned that she had been coming behind me to burp the baby while she was here. After she left, the baby suffered. She began to cry more, sleep less, and seem less happy. That made me cry more, sleep less, and feel less competent.
Her father tried to console her, but I wouldn’t have it. I was convinced that he was wrong. And while I wasn’t convinced of my rightness, I was confident that I knew more than he did.
I felt guilty every time I wasn’t automatically able to console her. Wasn’t that what mother’s intuition was supposed to be about? Didn’t “mother” translate into, mind reading, clairvoyant, problem solver? For the few weeks “mother” translated into haggard,
sleep deprived, lunatic who was barely holding it together. I kept thinking, “I know that women have been doing this for centuries, but how did they do it without
Google?!”
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