There are times when I embrace my motherhood – when I temporarily allow the rest of the world to fade away and cease to matter. In these moments I find peace and rightness, as though I’ve found the fulcrum on which my life is meant to pivot.
This is not to say the rest doesn’t matter at all. I will always be more than a mother. It’s just that in those moments I am a mother but I am also me. I can see myself. I’m not hidden behind a curtain I didn’t see being pulled.
Connor has been sick since Friday night. Nothing major (knock wood) – just the stomach bug that’s going around. But it knocked him flat. My whirlwind lost his whirl.
For the better part of three days I’ve been sitting on the couch, holding my small boy. His temperature raged and, in compensation and protest, his hot little body melted into me, sleepy and still.
I did all the mama things that come with a child who has a stomach bug – cleaning up, calming down, doing laundry. When clothes needed to be changed I changed them. When we ran out of sheets in the middle of the night I improvised.
But those are just the things we must do as mothers. We do them with love, but they must be done. To be fair, my husband took on most of the worst of it, but still. Those things are not the things that truly define me as a mother.
Mother and Child on a Couch, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler
When my child had been sick in the middle of the night and wanted his mama, I was a mother.
When I sat on the couch hour after hour holding him, I was a mother.
When I coaxed medicine down his throat, counting squirts and promising juice chasers, I was a mother.
When I lay next to him in bed at night listening to his breathing long after he had fallen back asleep, I was a mother.
This type of illness is nothing compared to what some mothers face. Nothing. But the type of worry – the what-if worry – is in the same category. It makes us mothers.
I am a mother because, when he woke up after that first long night and wanted nobody but his mama, I returned to the couch and continued to hold him even though my body ached with tiredness.
I am a mother because I would have taken on every pain, every symptom, if it would have taken it away from him.
I am a mother because during this time his every need came before mine. I gave up sleep when I needed to sleep. I delayed meals when I needed to eat. I passed on exercise when I needed to move.
Instead, I held him.
Because I am his mother.
