Moving Day

The baby is missing a sock.

This is the least of my problems, you understand, because today is moving day.  Everything is a jumbled mess in the back of a U-Haul.  The trunk of my tiny Corolla is stuffed to the brim with things I refuse to allow to touch the dirty floor of the rental truck: baby clothes, toys, bouncy chairs, cloth diapers, etc.

My father and brother-in-law are huffing and puffing as they scurry to get everything loaded before my  nephew's eleven o'clock baseball game.  I'm grateful for their help but I grow more and more irritated with every piece of furniture they move.
You see, it all happened when I was six months pregnant.  I had gone from a happy young up-and-coming medical assistant about to go to nursing school to a soon-to-be single mom who was broke and could barely roll out of bed due to the constant vomiting.  So my older sister took pity on me and I moved in with her family for the remainder of the pregnancy and the first few months of the baby's life.

But now it's time to move and I'm realizing all the little ways living with other people makes having a baby easier.  Not that I ever really asked for help; I didn't.  But every once in a while it was easier to ask someone to hold the baby while I swapped out laundry than setting him down and letting him wail.  If I felt queasy or had a headache, I could put the baby in his swing and let my niece and nephew entertain him for fifteen minutes.  I could run ideas and concerns by my sister at any time: "Do you like this diaper?" or "Do you think the baby looks pale?"

I'm suddenly realizing how difficult single parenting is because, for the first time, I'm faced with the prospect of truly doing everything alone.  I will have no entertainers, no baby holders, no family to bounce ideas off.  There will be no sharing of cleaning or cooking responsibilities.  I will be in charge of everything and everything must get done, despite the baby crying, despite me not feeling well, despite everything.

And don't even get me started on unpacking! 

Of course it will all get done, eventually.  Things might not run smoothly, at least not at first, but things will run.  Women have been parenting by themselves in much harder times than this and under much more difficult circumstances.  I tell myself this but I'm not sure how much it helps.

It suddenly feels like I have no control over anything at all... certainly not over whether the carpet shampooers did a thorough job.  So I worry about the little things I can control.

Now where is that damn sock?