One of life's little pleasures is the art of great conversation. You know when it's happening, when a lively discussion takes on a life of it's own. When words are consciously chosen and exchanged for effect or for extra flavor. An unexpected zip that brings a dialog to a new level of enjoyment and even at times, entertainment. Communication becomes more than exchanging words,thoughts and questions. Words pieced together are no longer basic tools of language, but are capable of expressing something bigger than themselves. They can create humor, meaning and strong, deep, powerful emotions.
HBM is celebrating the 9th month of Wonderbaby. In doing so, she is looking to choose words that can contain the depth of all that is the bond that exists between mothers and their children. Wanting to acknowledge some of the things that don't get talked about, including the visceral response mothers feel towards their babes. Something driven by intuition rather than from reasoning or observation. For more on this, I encourage to go over and read it, although you probably already have.
I want to do this. This is something that lives in the core of a mother and I feel it in my bones.
I was not a mother who bonded immediately with her child. Mentally and physically torn, exhausted and confused, I came home to a reality that was not what I had expected. I did not expect to be depressed or to feel like I didn't know my baby. I didn't expect to miss the sensation of the baby living inside of me. I didn't expect to think it would be alright if the baby didn't survive and life would go back to normal again. I didn't expect to stand in the shower for as long as I possibly could because that was the one place I could be by myself and not feel guilty about not holding the baby, about being just me. I didn't expect that after a solid week of trying to breastfeed that I would be unsuccessful and that I would spend 4 hours a day hooked to a pump. I called my best friend, the one who had a baby three weeks before me. I was so lost and incredibly sad. She told me to hang on. To give myself two more weeks. That at three weeks she had started to feel better, closer to her child.
Three weeks to the day he was born I noticed that as we spent the day together pumping, feeding and sleeping that I wanted to hold him. That I felt less anxious. I cradled him in the nook of my arm and spontaneously kissed the top of his squishy head. Looked in his eyes. I had never experienced an emotion before that felt as primal. In that moment, the theoretical became real. There was an unseen force at work between us that was invisible but tangible. I remember like it was yesterday, thinking, this is what a mother feels like.
Again, I want to write about this. The sensation that I have in the morning when my little man wakes up and we bring him into our bed and I become his pillow. Whatever position I am in, he leans into me so he's fully supported and cradled. The smell of his head resting in my shoulder, the sense of his hand resting on my forearm, it's electric. A kiss from him, especially one I don't have to ask for gives me butterflies.
