After you're pregnant, then you have a baby.
Fourteen years ago this summer I was pregnant with my oldest son. Four of my friends were also expecting their first babies that summer. When I went to visit my friend Vivian in the hospital I was floored to see that her belly had yielded up an actual...baby, with limbs and hair and a heartbreakingly beautiful fringe of black eyelashes. It's elementary biology, of course -- after you're pregnant, then you have a baby. The assiduity with which I had been reading What To Expect and The Baby Book would have led an observer to believe I was on top of the basics, but such an observer would have been wrong. Who knew? I was growing not just a bulge but a person. The intransitive "I'm expecting" had acquired a direct object: suddenly I was expecting eyelashes.
After you have a baby, then you have a toddler.
Today I met an acquaintance at the park, someone I'd last seen when Stella was a dark-haired infant sleeping peacefully in the crook of my arm. These days she has blond curls that spill across her shoulders, and the gleam in her eye coupled with the set of her jaw should serve as a caution to the observant: she is a force to be reckoned with. She has strong opinions and a favorite video and it's a bit of a stretch for me to call her "the baby" now.
Then you have a preschooler, and then it's time for school.
Tonight Petely and Stella and I took a long walk, down the bike trail and home through the neighborhood. We passed by his preschool and he got wistful. "I wish I could go there instead of kindergarten," he said. "It was a really fun place, wasn't it?" I answered. "You know, though, you've learned everything they teach kids there. I bet you'll have a lot of fun in kindergarten." Pete is on the small side, gray-eyed and sweet-tempered. His backpack, overloaded with school supplies, makes him look like an overly ambitious hermit crab. When I started this blog he was younger than Stella is now.
Then you have a teenager.
My oldest son left the country without me last week. It's not, of course, as if he ran away from home. He's on a ten-day Scout trip, fishing on the Canadian side of the Boundary Waters. Still: I have a child who's old enough to leave the country without me. I keep butting my head up against this reality like a mama cow at the fence, complaining about being separated from her weaning calf. I know, logically, that this is the goal-- to teach them to get around in the world without my help. But it's a hard goal, a bittersweet goal.
See, I've never had a job before where my goal was to obsolesce. Always before, I wanted to offer something unique, something they'd find tough to replace. I wanted to be a little bit indispensable.
Motherhood's not like that. To be a mother is to make an openhanded offering of the best of yourself, to say, Here is most of what I know about making a way through the world. Wouldn't you like to learn it? How to wipe your nose. How to change a light bulb. How to chop an onion. How to say, "I was wrong; I'm sorry." How to pray for your enemies. How to seek God in all things.
I'm better at chopping onions. Oh, God, make me the mother they need me to be.
After you have a teenager, then you have an adult.
This post was prompted by two friends, both excited and wistful, who are sending their oldest daughters off to college tomorrow. One is coming to Gladlyville for school; the other is leaving. They will probably cross paths on the interstate. I am resolved to offer up my little-kid sufferings of the next few days, the wakeful toddler and the spilled milk, for those mothers and their daughters.
I will do so knowing it's not long until my turn: in five years my oldest son will be 18. I suspect I will look at the boy who once dazzled me with his eyelashes, and wonder when, exactly, he sprouted those wings.
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