For two days now, Toby has started every conversation with others with the somewhat gleeful exclamation, “We put my cat in a hole!”

We made the decision to euthanize our teenaged and faltering cat, Spork, on Friday, and we spent a lot of time trying to decide how to frame it for Toby. We agreed that having him see the body and help bury it would help him realize what happened. (Seriously, does anyone have a definitive answer on how to handle this kind of situation?)

In the meantime, he’s piped up with some of the expected questions… “Was Sporky cold outside last night?” “How did she eat her dinner?” And some that took me by surprise… “So, when are Turtle and Biscuit going to die?”

It’s one of the few times I’ve wished we were religious, because then I’d have a pretty good script to read off of for situations like this. But John and I winged it with some “her body is in the hole, but her spirit and who she really was is all around us and in our memories.”

Who knows if we handled this “right.” Toby doesn’t seem too sad about Spork, but he’s definitely processing it all as he goes—he keeps asking questions at random times. But his somewhat alarming primary takeaway is the concept of putting her in a hole. Such is life, I guess?!

Parenting. It’s the ultimate of winging it and never knowing if you got it right. I guess until we see how well adjusted Toby is in the future!

“Hey Mom, check my butt,” I hear from the bathroom. I glance through the doorway and am met with the sight of Toby in a reasonable facsimile of downward dog, ass to me, family jewels dangling on display.

It’s a sight that pre-motherhood would have freaked me out. A lot. Now it just made me laugh out loud.

We’re in the ‘learning to wipe’ phase of potty training and apparently this ‘check’ of their effectiveness is something they do at daycare. My hat is off to you ladies if you see a chorus line of this sight each day.

If the childbirth process eliminated any vestiges of dignity I had, motherhood has made me immune to sights and tasks that would have broken the non-mom me. It’s like we’re lobsters thrown head first into the boiling pot of disgusting bodily functions. Once you’ve dealt with diapers, you really feel like a butt-check is a vacation.

I tiptoe into the room and pause as the light through the door glows against his hair. He lies flat on his back, arms flung wide, embracing the world in complete, innocent abandon even as he sleeps.

I should wake him and make him walk to the bathroom by himself. It’s my 10 p.m. potty trip for him; without it, he doesn’t always make it until morning without an accident. He sleeps so soundly, so deeply, that he says, “I didn’t hear my body say I need to pee,” when he wakes to a wet bed. So I stay up late each night to help him heed the call of the bladder one more time and set him up for success.

Maybe waking him completely would help teach him to do this on his own, but I’m selfish. This is the only time now when this 3-year-old dynamo, this 38-inch tyrant, still feels like my baby.

I pick him up and nestle his head in my shoulder, like I did when he was just a mewling lump of need. His weight slumps against me, breath soft in my ear. Just last week he hit the 30-pound milestone after six months at 29 pounds, and we had to have a little party in the bathroom, so proud of that pound. He tells me all the time that he’s going to “get soooo big my head is going to go through the roof.” Each time he does, a ghost of a tall, blonde teenager who towers over me and lives in a world all his own flits by in the background of my mind and I clutch so hard to my memories of this 30-pound piece of perfection.

The seesaw between baby and boy is so steep at this point. I carry him to the bathroom like a 6-month-old; he stands at the toilet, yawning and scratching his butt as he pees like a 60-year-old man.

And so I’ll keep picking him up, breathing in his hairsmell, feeling his cheek on my shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that his toes hit my knees now when I tote him.

Driving home from school the other night, Toby was telling me that his classmate Jay was nice to him that day. (There’s ongoing drama over whether Jay is his best friend that day or hits him and takes his toys. Welcome to preschool social life.)

“It prithed me, Momma,” Toby said. Cue the guessing as to what “prithed” meant. They don’t tell you in the mommy books that 90% of toddlerhood is spent frantically trying to solve the mystery of a lisped, mangled new word in their vocabulary as the 3-year-old tornado in 2T becomes increasingly infuriated at your stupidity. “PRITHED, MOM.”

“Prized?”

“NO, Thurprized.”

Surprised!!! When did he learn THAT word, and how to use it correctly in context? Who is this kid? When did he learn to evaluate a reaction to a social interaction like this?

All the Scary Mommy articles talk of ‘what they don’t tell you about the realities of motherhood,’ and all those kitschy truths they list are right, but GOD the biggest thing, the biggest secret about this motherhood thing, is how ephemeral it is. Every day, they’re different. Every. Day. He becomes a new person, one who can skip, one who uses “surprised” in a sentence, one who takes 20 minutes to pick what shirt he’s going to wear in the morning. Every day, decisions and tasks that were all mine to do to keep him alive, he takes over. And it happens so slowly that all of a sudden, your burbling blob who happily ingested anything in reach tells you he doesn’t like the spice on the salmon filet.

It’s such an odd push/pull, the twinges of sadness at the versions of him lost combined with the anticipation of seeing what future adaptations of him might become. I am firmly one and done, but I can see how this process can become addictive.