He Doesn’t Care

He doesn’t care 

Two months ago I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. Currently, he has blonde hair, blue eyes, and the most adorable forehead wrinkles. He’s also beginning to make eye contact and social smile and it absolutly melts my heart. I can’t believe I’m a mom. 

During my entire pregnancy, my husband has been renovating our back mudroom. From new flooring, new windows, trim, doors, drywall, paint, the entire room got a makeover. And being the one in the relationship in charge of growing a little human, I did very little to help him other than offer my opinion and the friendly reminder that we were on a deadline. Our son’s nursery being near said mudroom, I made it quite clear to my husband that I wanted the room close to being done by the time he was born. In my head power tools and babies don’t mix well, especially at nap time. 

While he did that, I nominated myself to make the rest of the house ready. I prepared meals for our freezer, stocked up on things that we might need while home, deep cleaned areas of our home that I haven’t cleaned since moving in (oops), and did all the things I thought one should do before a baby. But then I got to a point where everything physically hurt. I couldn’t bend down or sit down for long. My garden grew weeds and it drove me crazy. My kitchen countertops were anything but clear every day with non-kitchen items and it drove me insane. Other things like the bathtub, our bedroom, and couch began to be cluttered with stuff or weren’t clean enough. In my opinion, everything needed to be done before our little one arrived.

It’s officially November and my weeds are still running rampant in my garden. I’ve been home for 9 weeks now full time and we actually cleaned the old clutter away and replaced it with new. So what gives? 

My son doesn’t care. 

He doesn’t care that his clothes are hung all neatly in his closet by size. He doesn’t care that I organized our kitchen to give him a drawer for all his stuff. He doesn’t care that I cleared out one of our bathroom baskets and gave it to him for his bath toys, soap, and washcloths. And he definitely doesn’t care about my weeds (though seriously, they’re still driving me nuts). 

What he cares about is that I’m there for him. To play with him and not my phone. That I bathe him, not clean my floors. To love him, not just love a clean house. He cares that I’m present.

He also doesn’t care about the trophies I’ve won (though hopefully someone at Goodwill will soon), words I’ve written, places I’ve been. Sure, they’ll make great bedtime stories to share (like the time in Israel my professor laid on a grave and sent an Orthodox Jew running) but if I don’t love him well none of that matters. 

There are a few things I pray over our son just about every day: that he will be strong, kind, funny. I also pray that he gets caught when he’s in trouble, feels the weight of what he did wrong, and always comes to me when he’s in it. The last thing is I always pray is that he never goes a day without knowing how much his dad loves him. He can doubt Ryan’s love, he can deny it, twist it, ignore it, but I pray he will never be able to know it’s not true.

I pray this because when I look back on my childhood, I find that I too didn’t care about the house we lived in, if my mom swept the floors or if my dad’s gardens had weeds… I cared that they were there. I cared that they loved me. And so does he.

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