Feeling like "Mom"

I've been organizing/purging and cleaning out our books. While collecting them from the shelves, a little Anne Geddes notebook caught my eye. It was bought when i was pregnant with Darren. I opened it and started leafing through it. Mostly it was empty except for a flurry of activity around his birth. After his birth it must have been a shock to my system to try and keep up to any kind of note-taking. First babies... and all subsequent babies for that matter, somehow have a way of consuming all my attention. I have more than my fair share of notebooks that are starved for ink. In flipping the pages though, i came across an entry dated May 13th.

In small letters and scrawled in messy, fast point-form it read:

"These moments made me feel like "Mom"

-snotty nose

-rubbed eyes on my shoulder

-read him a book



That was it. A quick note to remember a fleeting emotion of "feeling like a mom". When Darren was born and they put him in my arms, he was so foreign to me. I didn't have a sense that he was "mine". I guess i had in my mind that some great *feeling* would sweep over me and I would feel forever linked to him immediately, but that didn't happen. Instead, in the day to day fleeting moments, we bonded. A snotty little nose, a fevered head, him falling asleep in my arms for the first time, having him call my name for the first time, reaching out to me. He was always my child, but it was taking time for me to become, or at least feel like a mother. I thought about it for a second. May 13th Darren would have been 4 1/2 months old. I wondered what book i read him. Probably "Guess How Much I Love You". I remember buying it for Darren as one of his first books. Tonight before bed i had read to Darren too. "Watership Down"...another book about rabbits. :) 470-odd pages though instead of a tiny cardboard one about bedtime. I felt like his mama tonight too snuggled up with him on the couch reading out loud. Not everything makes me feel like a mom...but somethings *always* do.