A while ago,
Imommy did a post on the
moment when she knew she was a parent. She asked if any one else had a similar story. I'm not sure I have one defining moment like that, where I caught puke in my hands and thought,
and now I am officially a mother and isn't it disgusting. I have many puke moments, but most involve screaming for Matt because, while I do poop, I just do not do puke. If a kid pukes while he's not home, any puke contaminated clothing gets thrown away and we go elsewhere until he gets back. If he refused to clean up puke for me, I think I would just put the house up for sale, with a puke cleaning allowance, and buy a new one.
On reflection, though, an incident a year ago did make me starkly aware of myself as the parent of a little boy. I had two sisters and Matt and I met at fifteen. We didn't finally get things forever right until well into college, but still my sum total boy knowledge is scanty. (Scanty, as in sparse, not skanky as in nasty. This is a post about parenting, get your minds out of the gutter.)
Ess and Gee were eighteen months old and I was five months pregnant with Cue. I took a long hot shower while they napped one afternoon, in all honesty because they weren't really sleeping and I was tired and grumpy and pregnant and I couldn't hear them in the shower. When I finally turned off the running water, Gee was screaming hysterically.
Certain that I was the worst mother in the history of the universe, I threw a towel around my dripping hair and bolted down the hall to the nursery. I fully expected to find him hanging by his ankle from the crib, or on the floor with blood running from his head, or something equally disastrous. Social services would surely come and take them both away from me because what kind of incredibly irresponsible, selfish idiot of a mother TAKES A SHOWER while her children are safely locked in their cages, uh, I mean ensconced lovingly in their cribs. Any mother worth her salt hasn't showered in months or at least showers with the baby monitor.
The trip down the hall to the nursery seemed endless. I stood over his crib, panting, trying to find the severed limb or at the very least a red mark. From his mattress, he ceased his massive, causeless tantrum and surveyed me up and down. From my turbaned head, past my boobs, huge protruding belly and uncovered private parts. His gorgeous green eyes widened in dismay and horror. I swear he shook his head in disbelieving shame.
"Pajamas Momma," he admonished me.
"Are you okay? Where is the owie?" My brain hadn't quite caught up with the situation. I still thought there must be a source for such drama.
"Momma," he reiterated more forcefully, "PAJAMAS."
It gradually penetrated my consciousness. My naked self was absolutely horrifying to my not even two year old son. This child that I had spent a year nurturing with only my long-suffering boobs. He couldn't even remember what part of him had been dismembered, he was so overcome with embarrassment that I would burst into his room sans clothes.
It made me laugh and cry a little, as I dressed in my room, having ditched his boy-who-cried-wolf, hot-shower-high-ruining, judgemental ass in his crib. It also made me think for the first time about my boy child as a - well, as a boy. Does that sound awful? It's true. I understand that they are human and that they think and feel, but at first, babies are just extensions of you, or at least, mine were. They don't change your internal perceptions much because they don't view you with an external perception. Maybe I am not perceptive enough (okay, definitely), but until that moment, I didn't sense any unique perspective on me as a person. I had become a mother to a baby boy and then a baby girl, but only my own understanding of who I was changed. I hadn't yet seen myself reflected in the mirror of their understanding.
That afternoon, I saw my son see me. It was my first glimpse of who I was from where he lay. A mother, not in the sense that I understood it, a fairly young mother, a new mother, a girl who loves books and travel and writing, who went to law school and still calls her own mother when things go wrong, who got married and became a mother. Rather, in the sense of a boy growing little by little, inch by inch, into a man, I was a woman and an old one at that. I don't mean that I think that I look old or that motherhood aged me, what I mean is that when I think of my mother growing up, I don't think of a young woman trying to learn and doing the best she can. It took my own adulthood, my own motherhood, to perceive her that way.
I shot into the future in my mind and pictured Gee, a gangly red-headed teenager sitting on the couch relating to me as a mom, an older lady, asexual, someone you did not, for any reason, want to see naked. I hope he'll see me in other ways, as a secure anchor when he needs one, a confident if he's in trouble. He won't understand for a long time that others have viewed me differently, as something other than 'mother.' It will take his own adult reflection to comprehend that I have been and am a daughter, a pretty girl, a lover, a friend, a sister.
It made me a little dizzy because not all that long ago I sat on a couch next to a teenage boy that looked exactly like Gee is going to look, only this teenager wasn't a child to me. I saw a man. A crush. I can't believe that in thirteen years a girl could sit right there on that couch and see my baby that way. A girl who is two years old right now. At that time, it would never have occurred to me that my fifteen-year-old husband was somebody's baby. I know now that he was, still, always, at fifteen and at thirty-five, his mother's baby because I know thirteen years won't be long enough to pry my mind from the idea that Gee is my baby.
Most of the time, we look at ourselves and our lives through our own lens. Every once in a while we get a chance to peek into some one else's view finder and take a snap shot of some other facet of who we are. And then, we have to retreat into our own heads and recover from the shock.
I can't believe I'm going to do this. There are so many things wrong with this picture. The skinny tie. The shiny pants. The puffy dress. The Ohio hair. The dyed shoes. Be kind, it was the late eighties.
Our first date. We thought we were so grown up. We were such babies.
