I was on the phone a few minutes ago interviewing a lady a million miles away. I am listening to her voice and listening to her answer my questions. It is an interview to come work on my team. It is early in her morning and late in my working evening. I can hear the sound of cars in the background, a bell ringing, there is a slight crackle on the phone line. She is self-employed so I am thinking of her sitting in her apartment in the middle of a big city. I am wondering if her husband is in the next room or listening in. Is she sitting on her bed, or sitting at her kitchen table. Did she get up and get showered and dressed for the call or is she in her jammies? I wondered how long she sat by the phone waiting for my call. Maybe she was nervous last night about this interview, maybe she couldn’t sleep. I don’t know. I am thinking to myself almost right away that she is a nice lady, but probably not qualified for the position….but I give the time I have committed to listen to her. I don’t want to draw any conclusions too soon. I am drifting in and out of her sentences. Her english is good, but her understanding of my questions is not. She starts by telling me about her life. Her career. Why she wants to come back to a big company. Her phone rings in the middle of her sentence. She quickly silences it and continues on. She doesn’t seem rattled by the interruption. I can imagine her throwing her husband the phone or just hitting the silence button then hiding it under a pillow. After all this is a job interview. But she isn’t qualified and I feel a little sad. I also am struck by the sense that she and I are connected by wires, cables, air and invisible bits of sound across mountains and oceans…but we are for one 45 minute block of time connected. We laugh and share niceties. She tells me about what she did when she worked here and there. She talks about her brothers company and how she got into it after she left her last job. We are at that moment two people talking together. The world is very small, but so very vast. I hang up the phone and feel so overwhelmed that so many people are here living so many different lives and we feel ours is so very important, and it is so very important, but it is only a small part of something we can never fully comprehend. I will probably never talk to her again.
A New Beginning
So now that Sam is talking a lot. I mean A LOT. I feel like I need to get started on this in earnest as these little moments will fly away so fast and sooner rather than later I will be trying to pull cloudy memories out of the deep corners of my mind. Wishing I had done more to capture these fleeting moments in my life. My goal is to write once a day starting in the new year, but let us start with this. Today I asked Sam if he was going to have a good day with Nanny Suzie. He nodded yes and said “We are going to see Santa”. I am not sure how he got this idea, but it was his own.
This weekend we were driving coming back from Lowes. Leon asked where we should eat. I said home or Z Tejas or Paradise Bakery. Sam jumped in from the back seat “How about McDonalds”. Leon and I just stared at each other jaws open wide. We went to Mc Donalds.
Our Babysitter
So last weekend Leon and I asked Kelsey to babysit for Sam for 1 hour while we went to test drive a minivan (yes, I want to minivan, but that is a different story). She agreed to for the price of $7/hour….babysitting has gone up since I was her age I guess, I think I only got $2/hour. Sam was fast asleep in his bouncy seat, he had been up for so long that I doubted seriously that he would actually wake up during the hour that we were gone. I was nervous, but on our way we went. While we were driving the minivan down I10 we got a phone call. I picked it up and could hear Sam crying in the background and heard a very tired sounding Kelsey say “I have a crying baby here and I have done everything I can think of”. She said she changed his diaper 3 times, sung him a song, read him a book, rocked him, and offered him a bottle. All of these things made him more and more mad. Poor Kelsey had tried to hang on, and not call us, but after 30 minutes of crying she couldn’t wait any longer. I asked her where he was and she said “I can see him, he is in his bouncy seat, but I can not hold him and talk to you on the phone at the same time” I was very impressed with that. : ) We went straight back to the dealer and hopped in our car to head home. When we got home he was a sleep in his bouncy seat and Kelsey was holding onto it. She said “I am holding onto the seat because he is not strapped in, I didn’t strap him in because he fell asleep and I DID NOT want to risk to wake him up again”. We told her she did a great job and gave her $7 for the hour. She said “I can see now why you are so tired, that took 10 years off my life”. She also said that she probably won’t be offering to babysit for a while. : ).
The Man-Cub
So Sam belongs to Bella….at least that is what she thinks. Bella is constantly near to Sam, anytime he is crying she comes over to see what we have done wrong to her man-cub. On Friday night we put Sam in his own bedroom to sleep. We had been doing this for a couple of night, but this was the first night that Bella was upstairs when we did it. I put Sam down to sleep and then went into my bedroom. Bella followed me whining and crying. Then she went straight back to Sam’s room and stood in the doorway and cried and whined. She was so loud she actually woke Sam up. I went to get her, but she wouldn’t leave Sam’s room. She spent the night on the floor down by his crib. Every so often she would get up and come into our room and cry and whine as if to say “you have left my baby alone”. It was so sweet, but not so amusing as the night wore on!
Letter to Sam
So I was writing a letter to Sam when he first came home from the hospital, but I kept crying. Every time I tried to write it….so I didn’t get as far as I would like. I have decided now that instead of continuing to try and write the letter I will write it in snipets on this blog as I get to it, or as I think of things. That way I can print it all out for him later to go in his baby book.
Baby Sam….Already I can not imagine life without you. The moment you were born is and will always be the best moment of my life. If I could live one moment again and again it would be at 5:05PM on Monday October 1st, 2007. I would be happy to stay in that moment forever, although I know that we now have a lifetime together of happiness and unforgettable moments. I have been dreaming of you my whole life. I have always wanted to be a mother, even in books and stories that I wrote when I was little I wrote that I wanted to be a mother when I grew up. It was one of the six choices I was given in my “book about me”…we know we have so many more choices than six, but even then it was all I needed because I knew I wanted to be a mom…your mom. You have been with me all that time. Before you were born my friend told me that the whole world would seem different after you were born. Now I understand what that meant. Everything looks different. Colors look different. The air feels different in my lungs. The world seems like a better and more complete place. I have traveled all over the world and now all of a sudden the only thing that matters is this small little house here in Phoenix Arizona with you, your Dad, and I. My greatest wish for you is that you find love like you Dad and I have. When you have love like this you can do anything, you can weather any storm, you can manage any trial or tribulation that comes your way. You chose us for some reason that is yet to be understood…we may never know why, but you chose us for you…for us. I believe you are here to teach me patience. Patience in waiting for you to be born. Patience in labor. Patience in not sleeping and staying up all night with you because you want to eat so often. So I will take this lesson as the first lesson you have given to me. I am trying to be better there. There is one thing for sure….you, my darling boy, will always find never ending unconditional love here. I love you for always and forever.
Sam’s Mum
Being Sam’s Mum is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Enough to make me start a blog…who knows what I will write. Ruth was the one who talked me into it after months of gentle pressure…it was the words “I print them out and put them into Mason’s baby book” that made me think….humm I need to do that. I would do anything for Sam.
I have many many comments on the sweet parts of being a Mum and also the times when it is really not so easy. So here goes….my blog…Rabbit and Bunny’s Family….samsmum.
Hope you enjoy.
