Holding On Before Letting Go

Still milking my pregnancy shoot with Caroline Owens because I’ve never liked a set of pictures more. Wearing the Bumpsuit Bianca dress.

“Before you’re about to have your baby, hold Sasha close and take a good look at her. The next time you see her, she won’t be so small anymore.”

I heard these words (a variation of which I would later often see in Instagram reels) from a well-meaning friend this past winter, as we lay on the beach, watching our kids play peacefully for about 7.5 minutes. I smiled while also mentally dismissing the notion, assuming I wasn’t sentimental enough of a person to deeply mourn the transition. After all, my daughter was four years old and hadn’t really been that “small” for a couple of years, not to mention that she seemed truly excited about the impending arrival of her baby brother. In retrospect, I definitely wouldn’t have been so glib had I been able to foresee the spiral I would go through in the last weeks of my pregnancy.

It started about ten days ago (i.e., two weeks before my due date), and coincided with one of the most intense bouts of insomnia I have ever experienced. For a week, I would wake up at exactly 3:51 a.m. with my brain on overdrive, obsessing about everything and nothing in particular. After an hour of trying to lull myself back to sleep, I would head downstairs, have my matcha, and start tackling what I like to call my “endless to-do list,” but is often just a manifestation of my neuroticism. One morning, a very confused Dave found me at 6 a.m. in my sports bra in our overheating garage, trying to manically organize 20 containers of stuff, a scene right out of Girl, Interrupted. Scared that I would give birth on the garage floor, he tried to help me figure out what was going on through an elimination method of ruling out all the things it wasn’t. It wasn’t the to-do list, for I had enough life experience to know that was usually a product of my anxiety, and not the reason for it. It wasn’t financial uncertainty—I had opted to let that one go. It wasn’t the labor, which was the last thing on my mind. The true root of it had something to do with all the upcoming change, and the fact that our little family of three was about to grow, and that Sasha would soon no longer be my baby.

Baby on baby. Wearing Levi’s dad jeans about 5 sizes up. Photo by Caroline Owens.

In a way, I had inadvertently brought it upon myself. After all, I had spent the prior couple of weeks putting together the baby’s room, which had entailed going through all of Sasha’s old things—washing her newborn onesies, sifting through the colorful developmental toys my mom had once gotten her, putting together the Dockatot I had a million pictures of her in. I had also ended up going through old photos of her for my baby list post, which had resulted in a two-hour-long spiral down memory lane. There she was, snuggling against me after a successful breastfeeding session. There she was in the tiny swing set in Plummer Park. There she was running through the tumbleweed at Point Dume in Malibu, during one of those Cali weekend trips I had cherished so much. Life was streaming before my eyes, fleeting and fast, and I wanted so badly to rewind those moments and experience them again with the only baby I had ever known, the one who had forever changed the essence of my being.

The moments that make me want to speak in Instagram adages..

I was also suddenly sad over the mayhem of mom rage that had unfolded over the past year, and ashamed about how I had handled my pregnancy. Between my nausea, discomfort, and constant exhaustion, I had completely lost my ability to control myself, particularly when faced with tantrums, nonsensical demands, and the general lack of logic of a very strong-willed three- or four-year-old. Rather than maintaining my role as a parent, I had allowed myself to become a child in my own right, screaming or even crying whenever things got too overwhelming for me to handle. Toward the very end, I had taken advantage of my state to be more hands-off, allocating bedtime to Dave and sending her on regular sleepovers at the grandparents’. Now, my daughter was about to go through one of the biggest transitions of her childhood, and I had no way of winding back the clock to fix the mistakes I’d made. There it was, one of the main reasons for my spiral, right in front of me.

With time running out, I found myself shifting my ways. I became the nice parent, the guilt-ridden one who gave more leeway and broke all of my own rules. I let her watch TV in the car, and eat dessert for dinner, and peruse Amazon in search of wasteful Frozen paraphernalia. I allowed her to sleep in our bed and even started loving it, knowing that these exact cuddles were limited and we would soon have another tiny human in the mix. (For whom this sounds oddly familiar, I basically used Mel Robbins’ viral Let Them Theory on my daughter.)

The thing with less screaming and arguing is that it leaves more room for listening. As I refrained from disciplining Sasha, I started asking her more questions and paying close attention to the answers. I realized that she had grown up a lot in the past couple of months, and that much of her stubbornness stemmed from her growing independence, which she couldn’t yet fully express. She was a big girl, she told me, and wanted to be a good big sister. But she was also scared of being in her room alone and wanted to be close to me and papa. She was sorry she screamed, and she really didn’t like it when I cried. The baby from my iPhone photo albums had been replaced by a sweet, sensitive child with her own mind and opinions, who felt things deeply and understood so much more than I had known. I couldn’t help but feel proud of the person she was becoming, which also meant I hadn’t messed up as badly as I’d thought.

This past Saturday morning, I found her in the baby’s room by herself, stuffing a huge toy giraffe into the Halo bassinet. “This is my baby, and I’m putting him to bed,” she told me, then proceeded to sing him a made-up song, something nonsensical about bedtime and kasha and jumping on the bed. It was then, in that sunlit room that in one week would be inhabited by her baby brother, that I finally felt my nerves start to settle. Life was moving on, and there was no way of stopping it. Sure, there would be tantrums and jealousy and moments of wistful nostalgia for simpler times, but we would get through them, just like we always get through everything else. Perhaps, I wasn’t ready for this transition, but there was no denying that my daughter was. And it was time for me to get on board.

Bedtime, kasha, and jumping on the bed..

P.S. This will be my last post before the baby comes. I have yet to determine how much time I’ll be taking off from Substack afterward, but rest assured that I’ll be back with plenty of experiences and thoughts to share. In the meantime, let’s continue building this community, a place where parents can connect and say what they really feel. There’s enough BS out there—let’s create a space for the truth.

Love,

MK (and Sasha)

Photo by Caroline Owens