Mermaid Mom and Barnacle Boy

A more personal post for my paid subscribers 🩷🧜‍♀️

I hope you got that SpongeBob reference.

If not, maybe this will jog your memory:

Around the time my son turned one, he gave me a name: Mae Mae (which is close, but not quite the same as his British-sounding pronunciation of one of his first words, mermaid, “meh-may”). Up until that point, I’d been lumped in with “Dada” who has been thus called since Gummy Bear was under a year old, or I just received a point and emphatic grunt/cry/smiley-dive into my arms.

I read in a parenting book that babies can’t differentiate themselves from their mothers until several months after birth. This makes complete sense to me; he and I shared my body for close to ten months. Once he was out in the world, he and I formed our own special feedback loop of feeding and sleeping and bonding. He and I spent more hours of the day holding each other than not. He and I, he and I, he and I.

When people asked to hold him in the days and weeks after he was born, my chest seized. Our birth was traumatic. The only time I felt safe and peaceful was when he was in my arms or in Michael’s. In the throes of the foggy and emotional early postpartum period, I didn’t know how to express this in words.