A daughter of longtime friends recently birthed a beautiful baby boy, and she and her spouse are happily engaged in rearing their much loved child. She writes that, being a parent, she feels pulled in two directions – imagining the future, and as opposite, being totally involved in the day.
Here’s what I remember. I remember sitting at the edge of my bed, holding a baby, my first, in my arms.
He was born via C-section, after 24 hours of non-productive, Pitocin-induced labor. He wore a small, knit cap in his bassinet, although he lived with me in a private room. After leaving the hospital, we took him each day to let the technicians stab his foot in search of a blood sample, monitoring his jaundice. We put him to bathe naked in sunlight to reduce same. We charted his weight gain (steady, but under par).
I was exhausted. And I continued in a sleep-deprived state for some while. We made adjustments. I took naps when the baby slept. Friends helped us move. The birth caught us by surprise – we weren’t even packed! We settled in our new house with our days-old infant, into the high-ceilinged master suite with garden tub and French doors, into the spacious open floor plan of the public rooms.
It was late afternoon. Outside the sun shone, birds sang, our dogs prowled the yard. The house was quiet, the baby and I the only inhabitants. He had fallen asleep while nursing. I gently pried him from my breast. He lay heavy in my arms. And in that moment, sitting at the edge of the bed, cradling my sleeping child, something inside me shifted.
For this small scrap of humanity, this tiny being, I would do anything – fight, bite, kick, scream, lie … kill. This small someone, this beloved child – mine, fiercely mine.
I know there are mothers for whom this moment does not arrive. But for most of us it does, either in an instant or in small increments that build a cradle of love around a child, our children. That day, I fell off the edge, into the Sea of Motherlove. With the next child, it was a gentle immersion, but I knew it waited for me … and for him.
