Once things finally started to slow down a little bit and my baby was actually taking a few naps, I had time to reflect on what was going on around me and in my life. My daughter was almost 7 months old already, I became a stay-at-home mom when she was born, and my past life was history. And I missed it. I had a B.A. and was very successful in college, I finally had a career going at a great company, and I was a concert loving girl who would go out and party with friends at shows throughout most of the North East part of the country…and Ohio once. (I once road-tripped from NJ to Cleveland to see a Live concert, and went back to NJ that same night because I had to go to a housewarming party by 4pm the next day.) I loved the adrenaline I would get from live rock shows and the feeling of truly living life and having fun. Now, I haven’t been to a show since I was around 8 months pregnant, and I miss it. Instead, I sneak in a few moments on the computer where I can catch someone’s YouTube video of clips of a show here and there. I try to pretend I’m there, but it doesn’t really work–especially when my baby starts crying to let me know she’s up from her nap. And -SNAP- back to reality I come. I do love and appreciate my new life, and I’ve also accepted it. It’s just every now and then I’ll hear something about a band or artist I love and then it makes me wish I could just go to a show. The reason I can’t is because I’m breastfeeding so I’m literally connected on a chain to my daughter who wants to eat like every 3 hours. I could pump a few days before and leave a bottle for my husband, but I am not bringing a breast pump to a show for when I get “full” from missing a feeding. I don’t think so. Can you picture me going to a show at Maxwells in Hoboken, NJ or the North Star Bar in Philly and trying to use their single-person bathroom for 20 minutes trying to pump? Oh and then carrying around a bag of breast milk during the show? Now that’s classy. haha. Plus, my husband would freak out if I left him with “the Diva” for that long, and unfortunately no one we know would babysit and stay overnight for it.

Since I can’t go to shows for the time being, I fill that void by singing to my daughter the songs I’d like to hear at a show again. Of course I don’t do them justice, but she doesn’t know that. She laughs and “sings” along with her deep sounding, off-key “ahhhhhhhh.” She always does that every time my husband or I sing. Our little harmonizer. As for milestones, she’s finally starting to sit up on her own a little bit, but we have to do the pillow thing where there’s a sea of pillows 360 degrees around her, for when she falls back or does a face plant. She is no where near crawling yet, but I read that only 50% of babies can crawl at 6 months and by 11 months 90% of babies can crawl, if they do at all. She’s a really big baby (95th percentile in height & weight) so I think she needs a lot more muscle to carry around all that extra weight. The one issue I can’t seem to find a solution for is her eczema and cradle cap. The eczema is really bad behind her knees and it looks painful and red, but the doctor says it’s not bad enough to give her medicine for it yet and to continue using the Eucerin Aquaphor ointment. As for the cradle cap, I keep putting the Aquaphor on her head, combing out the flakes, and washing her hair with gentle shampoo, but it’s still there. I’d love some suggestions if anyone knows of how to combat the cradle cap. I thought cradle cap was only a newborn baby issue, but apparently not since my daughter is just about 7 months old.

To think that about 9 months ago I was at an Ours show dancing and rocking out to “Live Again” and now I’m talking about combing out cradle cap flakes. Times do change, huh?

So how did I go from being Ms. Independent to becoming a mom? Well, at 28 I got married to my long-term boyfriend, who is a musician of course, and people in our circle of friends were beginning to have kids. Also, I’m an only child, and now that my parents are aging, I think I’d be very lonely if my husband died before me. Even though I enjoyed being selfish by doing what I wanted when I wanted, somehow my opinion changed and I started to think that maybe I did want a child or 2, although I guess you can say that my reasons for wanting a kid were selfish also, now that I think about it. I’ll also blame that on being an only child.

As things tend to go in this crazy place we call life, nature had a different plan for me. I did get pregnant soon after “trying,” but had a miscarriage almost immediately after finding out I was pregnant. I was devestated and learned a lot about myself. Specifically, I was shocked about how destraught I was over it for someone who “didn’t really care if she had kids or not.” That experience made me realize that I DID want children, even if it meant I may have to curb my concert road trips a little bit once I had a child. (I was averaging about 30-40 concerts a year.) During that time I went to quite a few shows to help me get some enjoyment back mentally. It’s crazy how songs you’ve known for years suddenly take on new meanings when something powerful happens in your life. Songs that you used to think were about love & loss of some guy/girl you dated, now were about death. The lyric, “how come we hurt the ones we need” got transformed into some kind of song about the body’s natural way of screwing you over by taking what you wanted and putting you into a depression.

I totally respect artists who don’t like to share their own personal meaning of what their songs are about because they don’t want it to take away from someone else’s interpretation of what it means to them. Besides, half the fun of listening to a musician’s mysteriously dark lyrics is trying to figure out what happened to him and what influenced those lines.