When I looked over the island counter in the kitchen and saw two young beaming faces my heart melted and I was charged to sustain the joy they were feeling. They weren’t opening a Christmas gift or watching Dora walk through our house, they were watching my husband and I kiss. (more…)
The voices in me are having a field day this week, praying on that elusive fluid idea: being a good mother. I’m not a person driven by guilt, unless I’ve blindly let someone down. Then I can swim in the soupy stuff with the best of them. I’m all about trying to get it “right” and usually accepting that when I don’t, I did the best I could with my understanding of myself and the situation. It’s not a perfect approach, but works well for me.
I’ve always held as my philosophical signature the idea that “life is full of choices”. Behind those words are a raised eye-brow and a half-smile which suggest that one should carefully consider the options life presents because our choices make us who we are. Now while I “become the mother I am meant to be” I see glimpses of the mother I am with the fingerprints of my decisions I leave behind.
When I began to wonder who was in charge of my state of being, I was 7 months pregnant. I had expected to feel the presence of my baby by that point, but the eye-wandering distraction which came to envelop me, caught me off-guard. One day it was upon me and I could not get back to “myself”. My laser sharp focus, intuitive observations and crisp synthesization slipped through my grasp, seemingly gone forever.
I hung up the phone and the sound of Kate crying a lonely heartbroken cry hung in the air. My heart ached but I knew that her bedtime routine and a good night’s sleep would give her the comfort she craved from my arms. I didn’t feel guilty, but I’ve come a long way since our first trip away from the kids.
The downside of all the sharing we do with our pregnant sisters is that it’s really hard to filter our advice and experiences as so not to allow negative emotions — fear, sadness, guilt or regret — in our own experiences to seep into the conversation. I found when I was pregnant, I was so open to everything floating by that it was easy to absorb the emotions behind the stories that were being shared in good faith (hence I donned the emotional flak jacket). How can you stop your cervix from pulling in when you hear about 32 hours of labour, petocin drips and tears which seemed never to end? It kinda burns a hole in your no-yet penned birth plan!
“Cookie Baking Mum” is not one of the handles I imagined myself adopting. Somewhere between a desire to avoid excessive refined sugar in my family’s diet and a judgmental snarl at behaviours reminiscent of June Cleaver, I have stubbornly avoided having “Baker” become part of my Mummy tool-box.
I became acutely aware, early in my second trimester, that Planet Baby was a stage which served to transition me from being a pregnant woman to being someone’s mother. This sounds obvious — but the distinction was about the sense that it was not just about “having a baby”. I was becoming someone’s mother and it made me sit up and pay attention.
From my office in a high tower on Bay Street, the heart of Toronto’s business world, I rarely got the idea among the millions of daily transactions and human interactions going on around me, that mothering is important.
There it sat anchoring the room, that status symbol of expectant parents: the crib. Who could have imagined with it’s hefty price-tag and its soft whisper of “adult-time”, this most symbolic first purchase would sit empty for months as a testament to the message.