I Could Write About Everything
This entry discusses my identity as a "mom," but I wanted to take a moment to honor that other parents may relate deeply, regardless of chosen title.
I Could Write About Everything
So many aspects of being your mother are worth writing prose and poetry over. But only other moms would understand, and even then, I am moved to feel that my bond with you is unique.
I could write about holding you skin to skin, your body to my body, and feeling you breathe little baby breaths, your body pushing into and out of mine in perfect tender symbiosis that I want to cling to forever. Or holding you like that, and feeling both our bellies growling – mine with hunger, yours as it fills with milk – and losing track of whose belly is whose. I could write about how relieved and happy and calm I am when you're asleep, merely because I know beyond doubt that you're feeling happy and comfortable and safe in those moments.
I could write about how every time I see a kid, toddler, or teen, I say to your daddy, "Someday she'll be that age," and how we're excited to meet the "You" that emerges, and yet a bit sad that somehow you're about to be a 1-month-old, though the hospital feels like yesterday. And how eery now and then I look at your sleeping face and hold and caress your ever-growing legs and in some rare moments, already catch glimpses of you not as newborn but as "kid" or perhaps toddler. You are mine – and yours – at every age. You will always be this vulnerable adorable baby in my arms and you will always be, and have always been, a teenager and an old lady too.
I could write about how I don't want for you to grow up feeling "watched" by constant phone captures and social media posts, but that urge to show everyone your face is so strong; I want for the entire world to love you as I do. And if I've chosen not to post your face, why then do I have hundreds of photos of you on my phone? Because I don't want to lose this moment with you, or any moment with you. Because what others see in my photo is another cute baby – but what I feel in that moment is a mother's love. You cannot take a picture of a mother's love. If you're very lucky, you just might capture the way your sweet milk dreamy face looks sleeping, with the light of the sun and shadows from the rocking chair hitting your cheek in just-so ways. If you're lucky. But even the most perfectly captured photo can never capture a mother's love, as it cannot capture the breeze we felt, the warm sun, your father talking with me, gently as not to wake you, both of us out of frame.
I could write about how your skin is so soft that brushing my fingertips or my own cheek against your cheek feels like touching a cloud, both in the infinite softness and in the vanishment of any form at all. I could write about how living between your 2 hour mealtimes has made me more present in this life. I "show up" more for everyone, perhaps because time is always limited, and perhaps because I am always thinking about you, and that much love can't help but spill over.
And I could write about what you might be experiencing at 3 and a half weeks old – you hunger, and the nourishment emerges from the ether, you don't yet know how or by whom. Shapes and lights form and shift, not yet connected to visual clarity or cognitive meaning. You know ache and warmth, discomfort and comfort, sleep and awake, dark and light, loud and quiet. This voice, this smell, these hands, and unfamiliarity. You are floating and swirling inside this fragile little body, consciousness and personhood slowly coalescing, like caterpillar goo inside a little chrysalis. It is our job to keep the chrysalis safe, so that you have this healthy little corporeal temple to slowly come to inhabit. Hands reach out from the swirl to hold you, voice to soothe you, breast to nourish you and answer your cries. The other day I had a thought, too, that perhaps I am also lost in a bit of a re-swirling of self with motherhood, also 3 and a half weeks old, and when Daddy's hands gave my tired shoulders an unexpected loving squeeze, I felt maybe that he reaches through this swirl to both of us, in our cocoon of love and warmth together.
Love always, Mom.
—Nova R.