note to pre-pregnant self

Brilliant posting: http://www.scarymommy.com/a-letter-to-my-pregnant-child-less-self/. I always say, I never knew as much about child-rearing as when I didn't have kids.

Incredible how humbling becoming a parent is.

I used to fight the clichés, refuse to even consider that I might become like my mother, that it's not REALLY the "toughest job in the world"; that there might be anything worth "wait and see" before making my blanket decisions and judgments on how I would act and react in all the various challenges of child-rearing. Now, I see what others see as the craziest acts of parenting, and I don't bat an eyelid. As a colleague says, when she sees a mom spanking her kid, she feels sorry for the MOM wondering what craziness was it that made her get to that point in PUBLIC.

I do think the article might need an addendum: the judgments return to older people whose children are grown. A curtain is drawn over their memories and they remember the good old days with a mixture of hubris and nostalgia, often with little empathy for the difficulties of the daily grind.

I hope my blog, and my near-incessant woe-recordings will help me remember just how tough it was, and help me be a kind "older" mom when the time comes.

feeling the love

I am feeling with number 3 what I feel like I never felt with number 1 or 2. Is that possible? Or have I simply forgotten? Can motherhood be so potently in-the-moment that even a few months or years later, one cannot conjure up a "few seconds in the emotions of"?

Let me explain:

When Nicolas looks at me and his eyes follow me around the room, I feel like a real mother, the cliché, mommy-help-email-spam type mom. The kind that they talk about in poems and "what to expect" books. Like I am the single most important person in the world (well, to this little being, of course).

When I look at Nicolas, it feels like my body expands, like the love fills up the cells in my body and I physically grow.

When our gazes meet and lock, symbiosis basically is complete; he is me, I am him.

It's not that I love him more, not at all. In fact, I probably neglect him more than I ever did Sebastian and Lucas.

What I think is happening is that the anxious, mildly neurotic, desperate-to-do-the-right-thing side of me is gone. These aspects have floated away, and all that is left is the impatient, daily-grind, hormonal mother who feels little else besides exhaustion and pure love.