Small Victories.

It's easy to doubt yourself in the beginning but it also doesn't take a lot to feel content. Today has been a great day. Adelyn slept from eleven to five a.m., woke up for a quick bottle and then slept again from six to nine. We ate, got ready, and went to MTSU to see my old friends at Sidelines--the college newspaper where I was editor in chief--and then walked across campus to visit my dad, a professor there. Then we went to my parents' house for lunch. We came back home, she took a quick nap, and then we went to her other grandparents' house so I could work out in their home-gym.

By pre-Adelyn standards, today was nothing. I would've thought it was boring. I would've thought I got absolutely nothing accomplished. But with Adelyn, lugging around a car seat and scheduling feedings and managing to keep her from screaming in public, I feel victorious. Empowered.

Just finding some sense of normalcy, no matter how mundane it may be, feels so, so good.

I don't know if it's because I'm young or because I was totally not expecting to be a parent any time soon, but all I want as far as my own life right now is to feel like myself again. I know I'll always be different now, that's not up for debate. Just doing things, though, that I used to do everyday--like putting on makeup or visiting friends or reading the news--with a baby feels like more of an accomplishment than any A on a paper, any job opportunity or experience I had when I wasn't a mother.

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A Reluctant Charlotte.

It's hard to go back and really think about how upset I was when I first found out I was pregnant, now that she's here, now that I love her so much. But I'm reminded every now and then of those first two weeks. Those terrifying weeks when my whole world was turned upside down. I didn't know what was going to happen with my life, my routine, my self. I didn't know if my health was going to hold up long enough to get a baby out or if it was going to hold up after he or she was here. I walked around those weeks like someone had just threatened my life.

It wasn't until I started telling people--my parents, Jason's parents, my friends--that I started to be okay with the idea. That's how I deal, I guess. A flaw of mine. I had to make sure everyone else was okay with it first.

I just felt so young. I still do. I felt like everyone would think I'd done something wrong, that I'd been irresponsible. And after everyone greeted the news with compassion and excitement--not one lecture--I realized it was really me who felt sort of irresponsible. I felt like a kid. A kid who'd just gotten suspended from school for drinking at the homecoming dance. Because that was me, not eight years ago. (But see! Eight years. That seems like just yesterday.)

For all of the good that's come after The Feminine Mystique, there's a sort of undercurrent of shame that goes along with doing those tasks typically been ascribed to women. Having children. Putting a career on hold to have those children. Doing the dishes and cooking dinner. Especially if you minored in women's studies in college and proudly call yourself a feminist.

I moved to New York after high school because I, like so many girls my age, wanted to be like Carrie from Sex and the City. I wanted to be successful, stylish, fun, smart. I wanted to have the career of my dreams and a closet stuffed with expensive shoes I paid for. Children weren't part of that equation. Because what self-proclaimed feminist wants to be like Charlotte, still hung up on the domestic fairy-tale? Everyone wants to be a Carrie, maybe a Samantha. Maybe even a Miranda. Charlotte's the anti-modern woman, the one we're supposed to juxtapose with her friends and snicker at.

I guess that's one of the many ideas that made pregnancy so terrifying at first. That and the idea of "mom-jeans." No style-obsessed 23-year-old wants to be anything associated with high-rised, pleated pants.

I just don't want to be Charlotte. I don't want to be the one the modern women, the powerful women, are snickering at.

Now everything is different, of course. Now I am a mother. And I quickly realized throughout my pregnancy that mom-jeans are not a requirement, nor is a positive sign on a pregnancy test a death sentence.

I went out for the first time post-baby two weekends ago. My friend Morgan was in town from New York City, here to meet Adelyn. And so I got dressed up, put on my beloved heels and styled myself beyond stretchy pants and a T-shirt and went to dinner with some of my best friends. Afterward, I went with them to a bar. I had a beer. It all so closely resembled my former life, the one before I permanently had a burp cloth over my shoulder. And I had fun, as I always do with my best friends.

But I only stayed for that one drink.

I missed my family, Jason and Adelyn, too much to stay for another.

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Sober beer pong and self-destructive tendencies

This Sunday was the 21st birthday celebration of one of my close friends. I used to live with this girl, back when Jason and I were broken up last year. We worked together at the university paper, and although she's a good 2 years younger than I am, we bonded one night over a game of beer pong and were inseparable for about the next 8 months.

I moved in with her last fall. I was still living with my parents, and she had a huge, paid-for house to herself with an extra room. I was there most of the time anyway, only stumbling "home" to change out of my clothes from the night before so I didn't smell like alcohol and smoke when I showed up to class.

We spent every night (or, afternoon) sitting on her back patio, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, talking and wondering what crazy shenanigans we'd be getting into that night. And a night rarely passed without some sort of drunken shenanigans, even if it was just the two of us sitting on that back patio until the wee hours of the morning.

And this, sprinkled with our time together at work--at which I was her boss, professional, I know--was our friendship. Beer, cigarettes, and shenanigans. Not that that somehow makes it any less of a friendship. In those months I lived with her, she became my closest friend. I told her everything, things I had a hard time telling my oldest friends. I thought I had finally-finally-formed a lasting bond with someone outside of my high school circle.

But then Jason and I got back together. I moved out to move in with him (and because I had graduated, she had not, and I had to make way for life and work). I watched our friendship morph and change, as I have with so many of my relationships over the years and even more fiercely the past few months.

I still saw her frequently after I moved out. I went over at least once a week, and we made the way to the back patio, beer in hand, and caught up over smoke rings.

Since finding out I'm pregnant, I've gone to her house twice.

I never know quite what to do with myself. We still go to that back patio out of habit, but I don't smoke. She doesn't either, out of politeness. We don't drink. We just... kind of... sit. And then I go home.

I've heard from her less and less since the big fat positive.

For her 21st birthday, I didn't know what to expect. We had grandiose plans for this night, and none of them included my being sober or knocked up. I knew only that I had to go, because she made that abundantly clear. I wouldn't want a pregnant woman at my 21st birthday. But when I asked her what she wanted, she said only "for you to be there."

The whole party brought back so many memories of my old self and how many things have suddenly changed (for good and for arguably bad). I had already gravitated away from that life. Jason and I already both worked full-time jobs and had lost the time to spend a weekend hungover. But it never felt permanent. The possibility of a wild, crazy night always seemed just around the corner. Now it's not there. It'll probably never be there again. Yes, I will have nights to myself again in life, but will I want to wake up and have to piece together the night before while I have a child waiting at home? Probably (I hope) not.

Any remnants of my self-destructive tendencies will have to be ignored. Forever. I cannot smoke now, lung-cancer be damned, because it's no longer just about the "self" in self-destructive. Same with drinking. Same with experimenting with anything, ever. I will be a better mom than that.

So I went to the 21st birthday party, even though I was ready to just crawl in bed. It didn't even start until 9 AT NIGHT. That's usually when I'm waking up for work. I was cranky, and immediately after getting there, I felt like a fish out of water. Surrounded by old friends from college, all drinking, all smoking on that back patio.

I played a game of sober beer pong, for God's sakes. And I still sucked as badly as ever.

I hope that particular friendship doesn't irrevocably change. I hope I can, once again, sit and drink a beer with her. In about a year.

But I find my phone ringing less and less these days, and when friends do call, it's the friends I've had forever, before we knew what it even really felt like to be drunk (and the ones by my side during my first forays into deviance).

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My only real experience with kids.

For about ten months during my sophomore year of college, I was a nanny.

I couldn't tell you why I did it. I'm not good with kids. I've never particularly liked them. I don't have any experience that would make a sweet, naive young couple think I was qualified to take care of their 2, 4 and 7 year old girls. But I answered an ad from my university's job listings, and I sent a majorly fluffed up e-mail to my employers-to-be.

I remember I told them I was a good student (true), a good driver (true), dependable (true) and a non-smoker (false). I don't know where that lie came from, except that non-smokers just seem more trustworthy.

I remember at my job interview, they said they really liked the fact that I straight-up told them I didn't smoke, since they were avid anti-tobacco people and their last nanny had ended up smoking in the car with the kids. Me, my lies and my cigs-1, honesty and tobacco-free lungs-0.

I felt guilty for about two seconds, but, hey, I would never smoke in the car with the kids. I might sneak in a cig during their naps, but I'm not that much of Britney Spears wannabe.

So, believe it or not, I actually did pretty well for a while. Those kids loved me. We made up games, I drove them to their lessons and classes on time and bought them drinks at the gas station when I had to stop for a Red Bull run.

But now that I'm pregnant, I'm having flashbacks of my time there. And it's not doing a lot for my mommy confidence.

The 7-year-old drove me crazy. Unlike the 2 and 4 year olds, she wasn't cuddly or cute. I'm 5'1, and have always been tiny (thank a lifetime of Crohn's for that), so she was my size. She was like a friend from school, only she made me watch High School Musical and forced me to feed her Oreo after Oreo even though I promised her mom I wouldn't.

And one of the rare times we did the cliched baby-sitter, baby-sitee game where I let them ride on my back while I nay-ed around their living room, she insisted she be on the saddle every time. My poor back couldn't take it, and sent her to her room so as to save my poor 5'1 self. She cried.

Another time, the 2 year old--normally my favorite of the three--pooped on the floor. She was still potty-training and wore a diaper, which I (thankfully) never had to change.

But this one day, I hear her enter the bathroom. I hear her giggle. I hear her leave the bathroom and close the door.

"Did you go?" I asked her.

"Yesssss," she replied, still with the inane giggling, and ran off.

And sure enough, she had, on the bathroom floor, about a foot away from her intended target.

I lost it. Up until this point, I literally didn't know this was ever a possibility--aside from the work of drunk frat boys and demented janitors.

"Seriously, do humans actually do this?" I yelled at her.

She cried.

"Pick it up!" I yelled again.

She cried, and ran into her room, locking the door.

So I picked it up. And then I swore off two-year-olds.

Yeah, I'm gonna be a great mom.

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On how life completely changed with one trip to the bathroom, and coming to grips with what it will mean to be a mother.

Something I've done millions of times, so much that I can, and have, done it in my sleep. Getting up to pee. Sitting down on the toilet. Relieving my bladder. Pushing the handle. Listening for the swoosh of water that means I won't have to get out the plunger. The minutae of life that is neither examined or celebrated, just something done every day without deliberation.

Except for the one tiny difference two weeks ago-- the $20 piece of technology, bought hastily at Walgreens, soaked with that minutae, blinking its tiny screen and its earth-shattering results in my face.

It shook me to my core. Took every thought, every ounce of my being, and rammed it into a different direction. Two weeks later, and I have a picture of the beginnings of a human life on my fridge. Two weeks later, and I'm not looking at clothes or news online, I'm reading about colic and C-sections and crowning and epidurals and incessantly googling every possible thing I could be doing to hurt this person I haven't met and whom I'm realizing more and more is going to consume every part of me.

All I know about mothers is that I love my own. I know that I gave up smoking in an instant, drinking in a heartbeat, and have let my allergies become so severe I've rubbed my nose raw all so I can avoid popping a pill that could do any harm. I'm already making sacrifices, already so much about my day-to-day life, and I didn't even know, or want, or expect this to happen any time soon. But the sacrifices just feel natural.

The impending journey is by far the scariest I will probably ever embark on.

And yet it is the most ancient one of all, and the reason I'm here to begin with.

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Pregnancy perfection and the woman I'll never be.

I'm sure I'm joining a huge club of expectant mothers who have an unhealthy obsession to TLC's A Baby Story.

It's really the only show on that, A) airs essentially 24/7 and, B) doesn't make it seem that pregnancy equates to an automatic death wish.

So, I'm terrified, I need answers, and accordingly I spend at least an hour every day watching TiVo-ed episodes.

And I've now come to the conclusion that this--this sole show that actually details the, you know, pushing a baby out of your vagina part, is part of what has been making me feel inadequate.

The women are all, well, old. They're all married. They all have a plan. They all scream for ten (albeit, edited) minutes and then talk about how it's the best thing that's ever happened to them.

We have two choices within the pop culture zeitgeist to watch a pregnancy unfold. And it's either this, or 16 and Pregnant, which is the complete opposite and makes me feel completely adequate and prepared (only because I have a college degree and doubt my life after pregnancy will entail any screaming at my mom for not letting me extend my curfew).

Where's the middle ground? Where's the voice for those of us in between? Those of who don't have 80's mullets and a white picket fence or a total lack of a life plan? Those of us in throes of the prospect of raising a child, all while navigating through what society says we're supposed to do in our early 20s?

I think I will be a good mom. I know my fiance will be a great dad. I think I'll figure out what I want to do with my life, and I don't know if it will look anything like what I thought it would when I was in college and my main concern was how to ace this test while simultaneously battling a monstrous hangover.

I suppose that's why so many mothers have turned to blogging, and within those women I have found a voice and a message I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else. But of my two favorite mommy bloggers, Rebecca at GirlsGoneChild.net and Heather at Dooce.com, both still have something I don't. A little bit of time. A little bit of an established career. A wedding ring. A plan. And, still, without them, even only at 8-weeks-pregnant, I think my hormones would've already gotten the best of me.

I don't think I'll ever be completely comfortable in my 23-year-old skin as a mother.

But unlike my virtual friends on A Baby Story, at least I don't have a perm. Or a mullet. Or a camera in my face whilst crowning.

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