Baptism by...

I don't really feel like writing today. I have already changed 12 foul diapers and the clock just struck 10 am, so my ratio of awake hours to bum wipes is disheartening. There's nothing like waking up to the angelic sound of your sweet, sickly babe hollering "Change a poo-poo?"

When Ash was 5 or 6 weeks old, I remember feeling like life was an endless session of Red Light Green Light. I would get up, change him, feed him, probably change him again, get him to sleep, pump (a whole other story), lie down, look at my phone in a delusional state of exhaustion, and finally remove my glasses and shut my eyes. Despite a diagnosed hearing loss in one ear, the kid had a perfect alert system for the sound of my glasses hitting the bedside table and it would start right back up again. We kept the lights low to encourage sleep and to try to maintain some differentiation between day and night but it was all pretty much delirious sleepwalking.

One morning, after a dazed and memorably messy 2 am encounter, I got up, dressed, got Asher bundled up, and set off to do some necessary errands. It was only when I pulled up to an ATM at 830 or so that I reached for my wallet and saw it.

Poop.

Dried.

On my hand.

Just the lightest smear on the back of my thumb, but I was dumbfounded.

Once I got over the shuddering horror of being slimed and scrubbed the residue with the abundance of baby wipes I kept in my vehicular equivalent of a hobo's bindle, I had a humbling and transformative realization:

I was a mother.

After 5 years of infertility and 30 years of 'girl-' and 'woman-' hood, I had been granted a new identity to proudly claim. That was a badge of honor, my friend.

(One that I quickly went home and scrubbed off again. And again. And again.)