Great expectations

I love children. I like them better than most adults. The best part of any of the jobs I've held have been the opportunities to engage with children. In many ways I felt that my real calling would be to motherhood. After all, it seems like my greatest skill is connecting with children.

Alas, the reality of motherhood is much more complicated than being able to make another mother's child smile or tell me funny stories. I feel so ambivalent about my own recent and relentless motherhood. I remember thinking b.b. (before baby) that I wasn't worried about taking care of a baby. I suppose I felt that babies were easy. They were cute. All they did was sleep, eat, and poop. Obviously, I didn't take into account that they cry to communicate and that you are a stranger in their foreign land. I didn't realize that when all they do is eat, all mothers do is sit and feed them with our own bodies, at all hours. Babies grow so rapidly and we have to supply the fuel for that growth. So being a mother so far has meant being at the mercy of a ravenous and incomprehensible animal who happens to look like a mix of me and my husband. And I'm supposed to love it and relish it each moment.

The strange thing is I do. At times. There are moments when I feel like I am meant to be mother to this small human. Like when I tell him that he's safe and he stops crying and seems to listen. 

I am also realizing that finding my calling--being mother to this human, does not make life any easier. 

Still, life is pretty good after a meal.