Motherhood

People tried to tell me, during the long wait for motherhood, how the love affair with a child is the greatest love affair of all. I heard what they were saying, and I tried to imagine it. I imagined it as best I could, but you really have no idea until you experience it what it really is.

I was very fortunate, in that my love affair with my husband has been very intense, very joyful and, yes, enduring. But I didn't understand how I would feel with my daughter. You just can't know until it happens - until it blossoms and comes into being.

It took some time for me to feel real love for her. I knew I was her mother, I knew what to do. I had read all the books and all the studies. I went through the motions. And then the love happened. Or rather, she happened. She smiled and reached out for me, and the love shot through me.

When I was a child of nine or ten, and my parents and I were spending our long, lovely, rich summers in a cabin on a ranch in Southern Colorado, we used to love the lightening storms. They were scary and wonderful. The thunder would rattle the rippled glass panes of the windows, where the grout had shrunk over the decades. Dust would rise from inside the walls which had been insulated with dirt by the pioneers. We, the three of us, mother, father and daughter, would go out onto the screened-in porch to watch the lightening, as the rain rattled on the roof tiles. My mother would hold onto my narrow shoulders, protecting me, holding me safe. My father would venture further out, leaning against a window sill or against a rake or saw leaning agains the doorframe. As the storm closed in, the sky would turn a slate blue, and when the lightening struck closeby we could feel it, the elecricity rippling through the ground, catching the metal of the screen and the tools on the porch. We could feel the electricty buzz lightly into our resting elbows, up through our arms...

that's what it feels like when my daughter tips back her head and smiles that broad, dolphin smile at me. Like electricity channeled through the earth and lightly into my bones.

Does anyone else wake during the night with a start, and wander into their child's room to make sure she/ he is still breathing?

I do. And I do during her naps as well. Working in my studio, I listen for the light, intermittant hush of her breathing. If I can't hear it, if I can't quite make out the shape of her head on the blurry screen, I start up and rush across the house and quietly in through her door. Just to make sure...

...just to lay a hand on her tiny, narrow pigeon's breast and make sure I can still feel the gentle lift of her lungs, the tiny, oh-so-rapid beating of her heart.

She is always too hot. Her heart always beats a little too fast. If her hands are cold, I quake, wondering if I have estimated wrong. How I love this child. This tiny being who cannot express to me what she needs, if she hurts, if she wants more love, or less love, or more space, or more attention. I am still not sure of her. I'm certain she is still not sure of me.
How can I express just how much I love her, without smothering her with the intensity of my love?