The small, perfect fingers of my sweet baby wrap around me. I marvel at how they cling so tightly and fit around just one of my fingers. I’m overcome by the magnitude of the feeling that I helped create a life so beautiful, so fragile and so precious. I’ve never felt a love like this before; so intense, so pure, unwavering and unconditional and knowing it will be like that forever because you will always be my baby.
I look down at your sweet face and feel such a clear sense of purpose. Yet I also feel lost. Becoming a mother has trumped any other accomplishment of my life. It is the greatest gift I have ever received. In becoming a mother, I have inadvertently set aside some other parts of myself. A great shift has happened in my world, it has turned on its axis.
The days can seem long but when I look back on the weeks they are unjustly short. How can time feel like it is accelerated at a pace so quick with so much change in my sweet baby every day when all I want is to savor each moment and all the ones to come in slow motion. I find myself teetering in my world, trying to understand and find the balance between being a wife, a friend, a member of my community, a good daughter to my own parents, and now at the center, a Mom.
Days are filled with rocking, swaying, feeding my sweet baby, making sure to spend time with my other children, laundry, cooking, cleaning, errands, bills - the list seems to have no beginning and no end. In all of this change, this wonderful and sweet time in my life, I have to pause and think - where am I? Who am I? Of course a wife and a mother but I also love to cook, to dance, to exercise, I love ice cream and long runs, dusk is my favorite time of day when the sky is splashed with color and the light is glowing and kissing the clouds. I love the ocean, the feeling of sand between my toes and the calmness that encapsulates me when I’m near it. Most of all I love my family, the one I came from and the one I am building. It is my greatest gift in life. Perhaps one of the hardest things for me these days is remembering there is a Me - that being a mother and wife and friend and all of the rest is all part of who I am. At the center is Me, the person I have always been, enriched and blessed with the ways I have evolved.
While I am going about the day, taking care of my children, trying to savor the sweet moments and get through the tough ones, I want to also try to remember Me. It is easy to be consumed with the magnitude of parenting but I believe it is also important to remember yourself because that leads to being the very best Mother you can be.