“I’M A MOM.”

That’s my defense for anything amiss in my new life. It’s a seamless and natural way of excusing my inadequate short-term memory and hygiene. It works for most things baby-related, such as why I’m covered in three-day-old bodily fluids, like, all the time. But it also works surprisingly well for just about everything else, even things not baby-related, like when I misspelled my own name on my driver’s license application, and then at multiple checkpoints I looked at the wrong spelling and said, yep, looks right, and then I got the wrong-name drivers license in the mail and my first inclination was to curse the DMV for what was clearly the DMV’s fault, because is the DMV a mom? No, it is not, I am.

I was trained in this tactic by my friend Mia, who recently enacted it from the back of a crowded concert where dancing hippies low-key threatened her personal space with their flailing limbs and unchecked joy.

“MOVE. I’M A MOM.”

Mia has been encouraging me to think of myself as a mom since my baby person was just a twinkle in my uterus, but it wasn’t until that fetus was here in the flesh, rapidly zapping my brain cells with the force of a thousand suns, that the perks of parenting really took root. I haven’t put pen to paper in more than two months? I genuinely can’t remember the last time I washed my hair or brushed my teeth? I still am not 100 percent sure how to spell my own name?

I’M A MOM. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So yeah. Wow. And in just two short months I’ve become every mom cliché I and you and the rest of the world hates, and I wear those clichés annoyingly, shamelessly as hard-won badges of honor. Yes, I sort of pretend not to notice the world around me when my kid cries in restaurants without regard for anyone trying to eat in peace — he’s done this once, but good money says it will happen again several thousand more times. Yes, I proudly photograph snot and poop and spit-up and text them with abandon to unsuspecting friends and family. And yes, I think my kid is the single most perfect human ever to breath oxygen, and everything he does is straight up magical, and now I will clog your Instagram feed with pictures of him doing absolutely nothing interesting other than being alive, which is AMAZING, because I’M A MOM. #sorrynotsorry

And that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. I’m a mom.

Also, it took me two weeks to write those two paragraphs so even though I aspire to one day write our birth story and share it with you, I probably won’t, because I’m a mom, and because I’ve already forgotten most of it, because I’m a mom. In the meantime, here are some pictures of my kid doing nothing, along with what we’re listening to right now, which isn’t about what it sounds like it’s about, so I just make up my own words:

“No I would not give you false hope, on this sweet and happy day, the mother and child reunion, is only a nap away, oh, little darling of mine.”

Ugh, I’m such a mom.