The Cerebral Mum

One of the things that I’ve learned about being a mother is how incomprehensible time is. While I was pregnant, the possibilities of Cas’ whole life were running through my mind. I never thought about having a baby, I thought about having a person, and suddenly things like life insurance and a will and a college fund became things I had to consider. Now.

I was very aware of him throughout what was a wonderful pregnancy, a pregnancy during which I felt more comfortable in my skin than I ever had in my whole life, during which I felt more beautiful than I had in my whole life (except for that last week once I had stopped work, and the week after that when it didn’t look like he had much motivation to enter the world), during which I felt so connected to every breath, every heartbeat and every mood of the child growing inside me. But in spite of my awareness it was still a surprise to meet him. I was surprised by the separateness.

I don’t mean that I felt disconnected, or felt less of a bond, but I didn’t realise how immediately he would be a person, that he didn’t need to grow into one. He came into this world an individual, limited by his inability to hold his head up, or speak, or feed himself, but an individual nonetheless. He came into the world distinctly himself, no longer a part of me, and I found myself waiting eagerly for him to grasp that first toy, to see that first smile, to hear that first babble, I found myself waiting for his individuality to be translated into the movements and the language I could understand, wanting to learn more about him, to learn more about us. I felt privileged not see him become, but to see him be.

With motherhood time becomes both too fast and too slow. This is a cliche, I guess, but it was something I could conceptualise yet did not know. With every new skill, new expression, new sound, I wanted the next, and the next and the next, but as all these things started piling up, I realised how quickly time passes. It is odd to be so impatient when the world is spinning too quickly. It is odd to want time to stop at the same as I want all my tomorrows.

I long for my baby and my boy and my man in equal measure.

And the possessive pronoun in that sentence makes no sense to me. He is so far from being mine, this individual whom I clothe and feed and bathe and lay down to sleep. Motherhood is both temporal and eternal. We get to watch our children unfolding day by day, yet, in those transcendent moments, we can see them complete.

I am a caretaker. Even as he clings to my legs for balance, I am a caretaker. Today when, for the first time, he walked the length of the room without a hand to hold or furniture to lean on and he came to me, all those future moments when he will be walking in the opposite direction were present.

I can’t wait to see him to walk out into the world, into his own life, but I am grateful that for we humans this takes so much longer than it does for a foal to first stand on its tentative, sticky, newborn legs. I am grateful that we get to hold onto the present and the future for so long, even though I know when that day comes, I will wish it had been longer.