The shock of motherhood

I am sitting in bed reading Christina Katz's Get Known Before the Book Deal, Mari L'Esperance's The Darkened Temple and the Sears family's The Baby Book. My awe of language's conductive wire of idea, image, information and emotion pulses through my evening. It appears that I have caught up on my rest enough to start having an abstract thought or two that diverge from the endlessly immediate loop of: "Is he wet, hungry, gassy or tired? Where's the binky? Do I have time to make it to the bathroom?"

Theo is sleeping beside me, curled into a little comma in the small rectangle of his cosleeper. He is layered in blankets given to him by people we love. It's taken me three months to learn to put my baby to sleep somewhere other than on top of me. The learning curve of care is humbling and slow. In this moment I am cherishing our closeness and separateness. In this moment, the line between his body and mine is clear. I study his small head: the delicious rolls of fat at the back of his neck, topped with a small spray of his longest hair; his pert little optimistic nose; private upper lip; the single dimple in his right cheek smiling in sleep. Tilted into the night: one perfectly crafted conch shell of an ear feeding him the ocean swirl of this world that he is slowly learning to swim in.

To have three beloved books open before me feels like I'm binging on the past...the woman I once was read whatever she wanted, went to sleep and woke up when she wanted, returned emails when she wanted. It is not that I miss her. It is simply that I am lost. I remember Marci telling me that for weeks after her daughter Hannah was born, each time the doorbell rang, she was afraid it was Hannah's "real parents" come to take her home. There is something so enormously and unbearably familiar and unfamiliar about birth. This portal of my body knows everything it needs to know, despite me. The thick shell of who I once thought I was has been broken open into something so much more powerful and vulnerable.

As my child sleeps, I wonder how he came to be my child. I chose Henry, Hamachi, Diablo and Valentino. I chose Jon. I chose my friends and my editor and my agent and my doctor and acupuncturist. I chose my neighbors, my plumber, my clients, my colleagues. I chose to become pregnant and was fortunate that my body was cooperative. And into my life arrived the single most important and mysterious being I will ever know––one I did not choose. This is the shock of motherhood: an initiation into the seismic love of the entirely incomprehensible perfection of her child. He has come to me as himself. I listen in to learn him.

As if rehearsing for something one line at a time but never grasping the main idea of the narrative, I move through my days. Exhaustion and euphoria are my absurdist cocktail. Bound now to this earth,  I hold my child. We sleep the sweet sleep of belonging.

Comments

[Jane Friedman]

I have rarely read anything so powerful or moving about motherhood. Thank you so much for putting it out in the world.

[Mari L'Esperance]

This is so moving, Sage, and brings me closer in touch with what it must be like to be so profoundly transformed by motherhood. Clearly it's a complex experience of light and shadow.

And have you considered (and I'm sure you have) that Theo has chosen YOU? I'm reminded of James Hillman's book THE SOUL'S CODE... perhaps Theo has chosen you and Jon in order to be shaped into the person that he is pre-destined to become.

May the Season of Light be good to you and your little family.

[dale]

Exhaustion and euphoria, yes. I remember. That's how it was for us, too. Reality just tilted, once and for all, and nothing ever looked quite the same, ever after.

Lovely, vivid writing. Of course :-)

[nancy]

Beautiful, just beautiful.