My One-Year-Old Is a Copycat. That Worries Me.

Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it. Yet.

This essay was originally published in the newsletter The Pomegranate. Read more and subscribe here.

I think about new beginnings every single day. Because every single day, I do something as a mom that I regret.

Sometimes it’s a little thing: too much screen time, not enough hand washing, letting my one-year-old rummage the kitchen cupboards because he’s too cute to stop. Sometimes it’s something bigger: not intervening quickly enough before one child hurts another, losing my temper, yelling. Almost every night I take the regret to bed with me, a grim and anxious haunt for the wee hours of the morning when I’m awake with my toddler and caving, bleary-eyed, to his incessant requests for cartoons and crunchy snacks.

Lately my one-year-old, Ben, has been going through a midnight-and-early-waking phase. Some nights he’s upright in his crib at one A.M., screaming and inconsolable unless I’m holding him in the rocking chair, struggling to keep myself awake as I try to breathe sleep into his resistant chubby limbs. Some nights he sleeps reasonably well for several hours and then sounds the alarm at four A.M., completely unwilling — no matter what I do — to return to his crib and succumb to anything so…