Mark, 12 Weeks and 3 Days

Some signs of your new sta­tus as a mother are obvi­ous and were pre­dictable, includ­ing occa­sional iden­tity crises, chronic lack of time and the appear­ance of mys­te­ri­ous stains on your clothes.

But there a few “side effects” of moth­er­hood you wouldn’t have thought of a few months ago—an eter­nity ago now—when you were still pregnant.

Here are ten signs you are the mother of a baby (I sus­pect moth­ers of teens have other concerns…!).

You carry an “emer­gency kit” in your bag, i.e. a super­mar­ket plas­tic bag with a cou­ple of dia­pers, a cloth and wipes. Because you never know when you will need it, but you know you even­tu­ally will. (Of course, you sus­pect the day you will need the kit the most, you will real­ize you for­got to put it back in your bag…)

You aren’t quite sure how the movie ended because you passed out in front of it. Again. And it wasn’t even a sub­tle and witty Euro­pean “art et essai” movie but a dumb and pre­dictable Hol­ly­wood comedy.

There is a spare paci­fier on the cof­fee table, another one in your bag and… damn, where is the third one, again? Right, in the baby’s mouth, about to fall off—again.

Spit-outs, pee and poop no longer gross you out. Well, as long as these var­i­ous body flu­ids are com­ing from the baby, and not a drunk guy on the bus.

There is some­thing wrong with the time, it’s dis­torted or some­thing. How come thirty min­utes with a cranky baby feels like five hours, but a two-hour unex­pected nap feels like a week of free time?

You actu­ally take a gen­uine inter­est in other people’s kids and can accu­rately guess a baby’s age in weeks. And you still remem­ber the dif­fer­ent preg­nancy mile­stones by weeks.

You pause and turn around when you hear a baby cry, even if your baby isn’t with you but safe at home. Can’t help it, it’s like you’ve been pro­grammed like Jason Bourne.

Your camera’s mem­ory card is full of baby pic­tures. Baby smil­ing, baby play­ing, baby wear­ing cute clothes, baby suck­ing his fin­gers… Good thing it’s your baby, oth­er­wise it’d be called “stalk­ing” and “unhealthy obsession”.

You always have some­thing in your arms—if it’s not the baby, it’s the laun­dry bas­ket; if it’s not the car seat it’s the day gro­cery shop­ping of the day.

You politely say “yes, of course” to any­one dis­pens­ing baby advice—from ran­dom strangers at the mall to your in-laws—and then pon­der if it has mer­its. And most of the time, you decide you just can’t be both­ered with more dos and donts and rec­om­men­da­tions, think “screw it” and do things your way.

You smile every time the baby smiles at you. And you glow with pride when peo­ple say nice things about your kid, although you still aren’t quite sure how to reply to the awk­ward “God bless him!”

How about you? Any signs of moth­er­hood I missed?

Related arti­cles:

1. Then and Now (Or Five Months of Devel­op­ing Mother Instinct)
2. 10 Weird Con­se­quences of Hav­ing a Baby
3. Baby Shop­ping: From “Aww So Cute” To “What On Earth Is That?”
4. Lost: Iden­tity
5. One Dragon Baby to Rule Them All—A Month Later, in Numbers
6. A Pinch of Chi­nese, a Pinch of French—Our Bira­cial Baby