When I was nannying back in the day (the day meaning pre-kids) I used to take the twins I sat for to the library for storytime.  At the time I was newly married and feeling the baby fever BIG time.  I would longingly watch the tiny ones smile and coo and dream of the day I would be a mother.  At that point I was super burned out from auditioning.  It’s interesting that Vann came along right around the time I was ready to throw my hands up and move somewhere, anywhere else – I was just done with being told no and at 28, felt like I was running out of time to have a family.  I know, I know, so dumb – but I was selfish and of course the world revolved solely around me.  Some of the first fights Vann and I had were whether or not we were ready to have a baby.  I think he would have been happy for awhile with our two cats and our downtown condo and the little life we had started in Chicago.  But I was restless, and in the end he gave in.  We were married in March and I was pregnant by December.  I was not a very good pregnant person.  I was cranky and moody and had gestational diabetes which was like the end of the world for this sweets-addicted girl.  I cried and cried and thought I would never recover from having to – gasp – DIET while pregnant.  But after that first setback I nested like it was my JOB and did what every new mom does – obsess over each and every little thing that pertained to my baby and her nursery.  I picked out THE perfect bedding, had THE perfect showers, folded or hung every teeny piece of clothing and took all the courses I was supposed to at the hospital.  I was on it.  My firstborn’s stubbornness started early – she got herself into a jackknife position in the womb around 20 weeks and wasn’t moving for anybody.  Which meant that I could elect to have a “version” – where the Doc basically sits on top of you and physically moves the baby from the outside – or we schedule a c-section. C-section it was: Charlotte Faye was born on the 1st of September in 2007.  3 days later, we put her teeny 6 pound body into the car seat we had toiled over choosing and drove up Lakeshore Drive as she screamed the. entire. way. home. Thankfully, my parents were there and because we lived in an apartment with no place for guests they slept on the pull-out couch in the living room.  There was no private place to nurse, our 10 x 10 bedroom felt like a cell and we only had one bathroom to maneuver between all of us.  But there were flowers everywhere and my mom kept the bottles washed and the new baby smell permeated from every corner.  Meals were brought over, friends came to see this tiny little person that was somehow half me and half Vann. I remembered the other day that the rocking chair we fed Charlie in sat in front of a window, and when you were sitting in it you could see the window across the alleyway – I still to this day don’t know the folks that lived there but every morning a light would come on at 5 am and you could see the little tchotchkes on the sill.  And later on, when it got colder, colored lights lined the window and gave off a slight glow – a reminder that Christmas was around the corner. And as is normal for the first time you do something, you learn a lot and find out that you aren’t the expert on everything: you find out that you don’t have to have the fancy nursery water – that yes, your everyday tap water will be just fine for the baby and breastfeeding is really hard and no one tells you about all of the stretch marks and God forbid the “mother’s apron” (look that one up) and c-sections and how jarring those first few nights are after your baby is born and how little you sleep and how disconnected you feel from your life and friends and how being one of the first of your friends to have a baby puts you all of a sudden in a different place… …a week from today my darling 6 pound baby turns 5. The one who made me a mother. The one who showed me amazing unconditional love. That gave me the strength to get up each and every day because someone else truly did, for the first time, depend on me to be there. She was a part of me, I was her mother. I was her world. And she is mine.  I’m going to require hours of plastic surgery and many glasses of wine and maybe some therapy by the time she graduates from high school – But she’s all mine.  And I wouldn’t trade her for anything.