True Confessions of Kyndra Wilson, Colorado Springs, CO

• We almost always eat dinner in front of the TV.

• My husband is the one that gets up with my daughter at night. On the rare nights when I actually wake up to hear her crying, I sometimes pretend to be asleep. I justify this by telling myself that I’m waiting to see if she’ll cry it out or just go back to sleep.

• I dislike taking my daughter to the park because it means I have to “play” with her on the jungle gym set. I’m really looking forward to when she’s old enough to play on her own so I can do my own thing on a park bench.

• When she’s fussy, I often tell her to “pull herself together” or “collect herself.”

• We let her watch WAY more TV than I was allowed to watch as a kid and more than I’d ever planned. Many of her imaginary games are now a takeoff of something she saw on Dora the Explorer. I’d read about this before I had kids and considered getting rid of the TV when I got pregnant. Recently, I’ve been justifying this by telling myself that she watches it in spurts and therefore that it follows her energy level throughout the day (low energy = TV and then she revives and does something else). I also tell myself that TV won’t hold the same allure it did for me as a child because it wasn’t forbidden.

• I’m not sure I need another kid. I don’t want my daughter to be an only child, but I feel no real desire to get pregnant again. This is not a commentary on how much I like or love my girl. [I say that because because my husband, who wants another kid, typically follows up my concern with “But Jordan is so great!” which makes me feel like he/people will think that in some way I’m disappointed in her. I’m not. I’m just not dying to do it again.

• I have become much more of an introvert since having my daughter…or rather, I’m surprised at how much time I need to spend inside my own head and how irritated I get when my little reveries are interrupted.

• As I type this, my daughter is, at this moment alone in the bathroom in the bathtub across the hall from my office. I often work in my office or elsewhere upstairs while she’s in the bath and check on her rather than staying in the bathroom the whole time. If she’s having fun, I just keep adding warm water so she can play in there longer.

• She hasn’t yet been to the dentist and we are pretty lax about her dental care. I make an effort to get her teeth brushed once a day but when she does it herself (and she’s been insisting recently), I know it’s not being done really well. I sometimes see a line of goo around her gum-line. Am I motivated to do something about it? Sometimes.

• When my husband and I negotiate the conditions of who will care for her, I often find myself referring to it as it “dealing with” or “managing” her. I almost never use the terms “caring for,” “parenting,” “watching,” etc. I feel bad about how detached and almost derisive that the terms sound, but they are what naturally come out of my mouth.

Tags: TrueConfessions, motherhood, getborn