high anxiety

Today we laid low, after having traveled 2-1/2 hours (each way) by car yesterday to visit Great Aunt Dorothy. I hadn’t been hugely enthusiastic about the idea of plunking the boy in the carseat for such long stretches but he actually did remarkably well. With MIL Judy and I keeping him near constantly entertained with toys, our hands, anything.

Somehow, Judy taught him the word “Two.” Not One, Three, etc. Just Two. He enjoyed chiming in at the appropriate time as I counted from one to five, displaying my fingers. Two, two, two; we’d stop there for a little back-and-forth on the subject.

I’d been told by a foodie friend from Albuquerque not to eat in Alamagordo, that there’s no good restaurants there. But one cannot visit Aunt Dorothy and not have a meal. I recalled having decent New Mexican food the last time we were in town and so I requested such. And we went back to that same restaurant. Margo’s. Still good — old school heavy fat and salt and lots of cheese good. Jonah enjoyed the aquarium in the entryway, and the refried beans and quesadilla for lunch.

It was a strangely long and short day since the car ride collapses in one’s memory and all we are left with is the scant few hours we spent with Dorothy talking about the family, visiting with the curios that populate her living room (a giant ceramic owl being Jonah’s favorite).

And tasting the famous family recipe cranberry sauce (involves nuts, orange peel, and strawberry-banana Jell-o). Dorothy said I couldn’t really be part of the family unless I liked it. Fortunately for me, I liked it.

It was also an exhausting day. I don’t usually spend 5 hours of my day in 12″ proximity to the boy, constantly working to liven things up. I was also (irrationally?) vigilant. This trip has made me unusually conscious of the distance between medical facilities and my boy at any given time.

…only 1-1/2 hours to a town with a hospital, only 1/2 hour to… Driving towards a town with a hospital, vs. away from one. If we needed medical assistance at this moment, how would we get a med-evac when our cell phones don’t even get reception here?

It’s a paranoid motherhood thing. Okay, probably just my paranoid motherhood thing. And the voice continued to calculate those distances and probabilities in Southern New Mexico all day in my head. Finally getting “home” to the in-laws’ was a mixed comfort since here we are 40 minutes to the nearest town with a hospital, and 2-1/2 hours to the big city with the children’s hospital.

Not that anything bad is going to happen. Just what if it did. Knock on wood.

I have the same anxiety on airplanes. It’s just a little odd to have it on the ground. In general, I’ve taken our big-city life and all the amenities it engenders including a world-class children’s hospital within a few short miles of our house, for granted.

I know I need to trust more, have more faith, picture disasters less. I feel like motherhood has made me more anxious than I already had the tendency to be. Oh well.

This trip has also challenged my tendency to be, ah… a little controlling. I fought to have us do lunch rather than dinner in Alamagordo. I just didn’t think it would be good for the boy to be out so late, then sleeping in the car — or not sleeping as the possibility may be with him — for hours past his bedtime.

And then, Saturday night presented another conundrum. FIL’s bluegrass band would be playing at a restaurant in the 40-minutes-away town, going onstage at 8pm. Boy’s bedtime is somewhere around 6:30-7:30. There were many options, including step-MIL’s offer to stay home with the boy while husband and I had a proper night out and enjoyed the music.

I love bluegrass. I adore my FIL and would love to see him play with his band. I adore my sMIL — and she has extensive professional experience caring for babies as a former nanny, but I just can’t fathom leaving the boy home with her or anyone and being 40 minutes away. I worried about whether or not we’d leave the car with the car seat for her in case of emergency. I worried that he’d be scared and upset at bedtime if I wasn’t there to sing to him and put him down.

And the longer I sat with it, the more I realized that the boy would probably be fine, Judy would be fine, probably nothing bad would happen requiring emergency car rides in the middle of the night.

And I still couldn’t do it. I realized there’s something in me, like a cord that ties me — I need to be close to him. I need to feel like I’m protecting him, even if it isn’t necessary.

Maybe I’ll grow out of it, maybe I’ll have to. Am I going to be one of those helicopter moms?

For tonight, yes.

Which meant that we all went to dinner in two cars. We had a lovely meal — I ate green chile for about the eighth time in four days, in this case on a cheeseburger, the boy ate mac-and-cheese with his hands. Fortunately the band started early, around 7:45.

We stood in front of the stage, the boy in the ergo, his eyes wide like saucers, his legs giving a little kick-kick from time to time. The music was a good (not loud) volume. He seemed to be enjoying it. Halfway through the second song, he rested his head with a thunk against my chest. By the third song he had that faraway look. During the fourth song, his eyelids drifted shut, flicked open, head shifting from side to side, falling asleep but being repeatedly roused by the bass. And then he was out. It was barely 8 p.m.

And that brought us to the decision moment. We could have stayed. I could have sat at our table at the front of the restaurant, far from the stage, let him sleep on my chest, listened to the music. Except I couldn’t.

Once he was asleep, I needed to take him home. Isn’t that backwards? I’d resolved that of all our options that night, what appealed most to me was to bring him out and let him stay up past his bedtime. I figured we’d listen to music for an hour and then take him home at 9. And then in the face of some pretty rockin’ bluegrass, he zonked.

As we drove back, Scott said, “There are parents who would have put the sleeping child on a chair and stayed.” Yes. “And there are parents who would never have taken him in the first place.” Right. And, I thought, there are parents who would definitely have taken a mother-in-law up on an offer to baby sit like that.

On the other hand, Scott added, “This is the only time in your life that you get to do this.” Right. As much as sometimes I stretch myself and challenge my limits, this person who likes to stay close to home, close to readily available medical care, close to my boy, is me. I get to be this parent.