It's the future!

I'm about 12 years older. I have a baby. I was a programmer for a while. The more I got to design and program the more I loved the job. The more I had to use crappy, poorly-documented code and broken builds the more I hated it. Overall, I'd do it again in a heartbeat but not until the baby is older. I have the option to stay home with him indefinitely and, although it is exhausting work, I love every minute of it. I used to think people just said that so they didn't feel bad about how hard it is, but it's totally true. I love it. What can I say, I'm a sucker for hard work and, now, babies. Or at least mine.

Speaking of the new gig, that's part of why I haven't started writing again and part of why I need this. I have just gotten to where I now have 1-3 hours without the baby (or anyone else, usually) at night. It can be a time of reflection and writing helps me make the most of that, so here I am.

When my son was born, I lost my false sense of security. You know, the feeling like bad things don't just happen to us out of the blue. It's an important thing to have and it's really hard to live without, though it is untrue and undeserved. Bad things happen out of the blue all the time to perfectly wonderful people. For a few months there, my OCD went a bit overboard: regaling me with all the horrible things that, because I could imagine them, necessarily must be bound to happen to my new baby, myself and/or my husband. That if I left my baby for any reason, Terrible Things that only I could have prevented were going to happen to him. Fortunately, I knew this wasn't True and I still got breaks for things like showering, using the bathroom and sometimes to eat without the baby on me. The baby parts were beautiful and the scary brain parts were a special kind of hell that I'm glad only lasted a couple months. It was exhausting. As if having a new baby isn't exhausting enough. I'm sure a lot of the heightened OCD was just sleep deprivation. I still don't sleep much, but enough to be much more functional and enough to keep my OCD back to very functional mostly-non-existent levels again. Well, it's nearly my new much-earlier bedtime and if I don't observe it I will be One Tired Mama. And that makes for a boring mama. My baby deserves better than that. Plus, I've got a fairly solid start on this blogging thing again. I hope I can reconnect with some old friends around here and maybe make some new ones. :)