Motherhood and Time Travel

The first time I made eye contact with my child, I fell in love with him. That's when it happened for me. I didn't walk (or waddle) around in love with my baby bump. It happened when I saw him. When he saw me. When we saw each other for the first time. His eyes were wild after 27 hours of pitocin-induced labor and three hours (though you could have told me it was 20 minutes) of pushing. I thought he was pale. Daddy tells me he was grey. I made some randomly strange mental note of how perfect his ears were. It took him a few minutes to cry, and the bed rail blocked my view as I craned my neck to see the nurses suctioning him and giving him oxygen as my OB was stitching up some tearing I had sustained evicting my son from the only home he'd known so far. His discordant protestations were music to my ears.

The first, what? Days? Weeks? Were a blur. The twilight zone sleep-deprived haze of having grown and birthed a tiny human is then outdone by the bucket-of-ice-water-to-questionable-reality existence that are the first days of new parenthood. It was some elaborate cosmic practical joke. Somebody broke in and left a baby in our condo. My Heart Mother came for the birth of her first grandson (though her grand daughters have made her a great grandmother many times over!) Thank the Goddess she was there the first few weeks of his life, another save I will never be able to thank her for enough.

Our Super Duper Little Booper came out looking just like his momma. I showed a friend of mine a baby picture of me, and she thought it was a picture of the Duper with some cool 1970's photo filter on it.  I suspect as he grows and hits puberty his appearance will shift to proffer more evidence that he is indeed biologically related to his father and not actually a clone of me. But – some time during the first two weeks in his life – I had an out-of-body experience with my child. Why not? He sure spent enough time inside my body. 

Mom as a baby

 

Super Duper Little Booper

I was sitting alone with him in a chair. My left leg crossed over my right knee, his head was cradled at the bend of my knee and I was just looking at him, taking him in. He looked so much like me, and the longer I gazed at him the more the boundaries of being two separate entities fell away. I was holding myself. Baby me. I was him, he was me. I remember a slightly panicked momentary confusion at losing track of who was who before the silly details of reality were given an atomic wedgie and shoved into a high-school locker. I felt the circular flow through time space existence and that very moment tornadoed away in a blender-ized moment of infinite now.

I was holding newborn me and loving myself completely. This love for myself opened a trap door to the past which then pulled me through the hardest times of my upbringing. A circuit was completed in that moment. My love for my son gave me love for myself which helped bring me through my difficult childhood. But it all happened in this now. This experience was completely real to me, and I have done my best to explain it. I came back to myself with tears in my eyes and awe in my heart.

The next morning, I asked my Mumma Gail – “How do I make sure he never forgets He's magical and made of stars?”

“Well, you tell him,” she replied, “tell him often.”

Duncan and I were receiving gifts every day for weeks after our baby was born. The day I asked that question out loud, Duper got a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star finger puppet book in the mail and a star covered onesie delivered in person by one of his many Maui aunties. You know, just to make sure that I really got the point that magic does exist. Our children come to remind us of that.

This turn of events started a ritual with me. A loving incantation was born, and I hold my son every day and tell him:

You're magical

You're made of stars

You came from the stars

Your Father and I are so Blessed

To have you in our lives

And you are the best thing

That I have ever done

People often asked if I was used to having a baby in the months after he was born. They even assumed I was, starting comments with “surely you're used to it by now...”

Nope.

Going into his ninth month and the novelty has not tarnished. He is different every day, and every day is Christmas. The gift I unwrap every day is unconditional love. And a few really impressive diapers.