Mommy’s Groove

I was questioning things from my pre-pregnancy life I had always accepted as fact. Moving into the second trimester of pregnancy, I was increasingly uncomfortable with what appeared to be popular rites of pregnancy for their lack of connection to the bigger questions of becoming someone’s mother. While I was open to learning how to behave from those who came before me, I was beginning to sense there were decisions lurking around every corner about which I knew absolutely nothing; and I had yet to scratch the surface of the medical pregnancy.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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When I was pregnant, it seemed to me that there was one irrefutable truth: my body, not my mind, knew how to develop this baby and it knew how it was going to get it out. No manner of intellectualizing was going to change how my body would labour and birth my baby. It was totally out of my hands.

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Even with my oldest, dearest friend I’m aware of holding back as I listen to her most recent progress report — she and I are at different places on the continuum of becoming a mother.

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