mommy

When Lukas was first born I didn’t exactly feel like his mommy. I didn’t feel like anyone’s “mommy”. I didn’t know what it meant to be a mommy. I only knew what I had imagined of other moms, including my own. Besides, he didn’t seem to know the difference between my holding him or a random stranger. I felt like the food source. I felt responsible. But I didn’t feel like a mom how I had imagined. When I thought of becoming a parent I thought of school games and plays, apple picking, helping with homework, playing outside. I didn’t think of continual breast feeding and no sleep. I didn’t think of child care and being house bound.

I haven’t been house bound these days. I live in Vermont and it is summer and therefore I must be out enjoying it….that is the rule. If there was anything that my mother taught me it was to get out and enjoy the sun. But summer is flying by. Lukas is 9 months old now. He has now been born into this world for a longer time than he spent in my belly. Maybe he even feels a bit more at home here in this hot, cold, wet, dry ever changing world of opposites. In this place that must feel like continual riddles to him.
All Lukas wants to do these days is walk around…walk around and investigate these riddles. I hold his hands and he walks and my back aches more each day. But I like to watch him discover the small things…a coaster, a piece of string, a discarded can. All of it is exciting to him and I want to be a part of that excitement. I don’t want to miss a moment. I love watching his likes and dislikes appear as he encounters the same objects each day….the knobs on the cupboard, the sink, the recycling box. Magically he begins to unfold as an individual with his own wants. And as he appears as this separate little person I start to see the mommy in me. Me, the one packing him crackers and carrot sticks. The mommy making him baby food or carrying him up to bed from the car, his body soft and surrendered to sleep. And he seems to see me as his mommy too. He begins to help me define this role as he watches me come into the room and beams at me. Or when he reaches for me in his late night exhaustion or nuzzles into my shoulder as we meet a stranger. He seems to know me as safety and I so want to be that for him.
I wouldn’t say that I know what it is to be a mom or that I even totally feel like a “mom”. I still have major moments of immaturity, moments where I only want to care about me. But I would say that I am beginning to understand. As Lukas slowly unfolds and opens into this world, I feel my own unfurling. As I watch and witness him emerge, helping him to discover who he is in this world, he too takes my hands and through his need and recognition helps me to uncover the mother inside me. Thus we begin the dance.