The meaning of Mom

I was still in that murky mist of thought that follows deep sleep when I awoke this morning to the sound of little babblings from the co-sleeper next to me. I rolled over and saw a cherubic face smiling back at me. I could not help but smile myself. It took a few moments before I began to think clearly, and I delighted anew in that smile, because a brief interlude from the nighttime rose through the fog to my conscious mind.

Sometime in the early morning hours I had awoken to a frightened cry. Ian doesn't usually wake and cry in the night, although he sometimes whines or fusses for a few moments, so this was a different experience. Motherly instinct took over immediately, and I reached over to him, lifted him onto my bed where I could hold him, cooed at him and cuddled him and wondered what terror had assailed him in his sleep. He settled back to sleep quickly, so I returned him to his own bed and drifted back to sleep myself, musing on what sort of fears might plague such a tiny child.

Last night I watched part of the PBS adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. I was struck by one line, spoken by Emma's chronically fretful father: "You do not know what it is to fear until you have had a child." I laughed and repeated the line to Daniel, but not because it was funny so much as because it rings true. I'm sometimes nearly as fretful as that beleaguered gentleman is, but I'm grateful not to know the truth of his words better than I do, because so much of parenting seems to be the struggle between faith and fear -- the one the result of trusting God and his providence, the other a result of trusting (and mistrusting) myself. God has been exceptionally gracious to us, because if the worst things we have had to worry about in 6 months have been a low-grade fever and a somewhat lopsided skull, I have been given the most gentle introduction to motherhood that I can imagine.

I have my moments. I had one a few days ago when I was besieged by the full weight of what it means to have a baby who needs to be cared for at all times. I was angry and frustrated, because I could not do something I wanted to do, and I could not figure out how to make it work out. Daniel was able to participate, and I was stuck being mom. To be fair, Daniel would have been willing to do daddy duty so I could take his place, but I knew how much he wanted to do it, so I felt it was right to give him the opportunity. So, there I was, resenting Daniel's relative freedom, feeling trapped by my own guilt and selfish will, and unable to come up with some way to make my inconvenience disappear. To top it off, I had the presence of mind to be absolutely disgusted by how selfish and unreasonable I was being. It was an awful feeling.

I had to sit myself down and have a moment of reflection:
This is what I signed up for. This just is what being a wife and mother means. It doesn't meant that I never get to do what I want to do -- nothing as dramatic as all that -- but it means that I have the opportunity to sacrifice my own desires to give to those I love. It is a gift, not a burden. It is ridiculous to even want my life to be any other way. After all, if the daily annoyances of not having complete autonomy are the only price I pay for having such a dear husband and son, then my cross is light indeed. The blessings are far greater, even when I'm at wit's end and have run out of "me" to give. That is because the real gift is God's love, and I am asked only to be open enough that I may be a conduit.

Ah, love! I'm beginning to understand more keenly what people mean when they say that they fall in love with someone more every day. There is something so beautiful about watching a helpless infant transform before your eyes into a little person with likes, dislikes, his own sense of humor and justice, and his own mind, which is captivated by the world around him and so open to new experiences. The more I know him, the more I love him. The more I love him, the more I want to cling to every moment and treasure it in my heart.

I heard a radio story on NPR about a week ago about the passage of time, especially how it seems to move so much more quickly as we age. Apparently there are more reasons for this than just our own increasing awareness of our mortality. In short, whenever the mind experiences something new, it catalogs the new information rather thoroughly, so that it merely has to revisit the stored data when another experience of the same type comes along. It makes the experience of youth nuanced, detailed and rich, because everything has the sheen of newness. For this little baby, every moment brings that freshness, and his mind is compiling like crazy. For an older person, who has learned the truth of the assertion that there is "nothing new under the sun," there is simply less to file away about the world, so memories become simpler, and the good old days seem somehow more beautiful than the day-to-day cares of adult life. I suppose this is why travel makes such an impression on us, no matter our ages: we give our brains the opportunity to process something full of new details, and our brains rev up again to capture it all.

How lovely it is to be given the opportunity to watch the world unfold in his life as I near what is likely to be the middle of my own. It gives me a whole new set of moments to catalog, like what it is to see your child taste his first solid food, what a delight it is to observe his raptures with a new toy, and what a thrill it is to do simple things, like watching him take a peaceful impromptu nap on the floor.

These moments are so sweet, yet so fleeting. I hope that my mind will catalog these moments with all of the freshness and importance they have in my heart, because they are, indeed, precious, and they give such rich meaning to my life as "Mommy".

First tastes of sweet potato

An impromptu nap