Mom-Me: How I Came to Be

Mommy Goals

For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a mother. In the early years of elementary school, I wanted two boys and two girls. In the early years of high school, I insisted that I would have all four of these children (their genders no longer mattered) between the ages of 24 and 30. At 24, I can’t remember how I broached the subject with this tall guy I had recently started dating, but I simply stated that I wanted four kids.

Throughout all those years of dreaming up motherhood, I was always realistic that being a mother wouldn’t be easy. I watched enough kids, my cousins, neighbors, summer campers, to know what to expect; namely, the unexpected happens and you just gotta go with it.

The Waiting Game

Ironically, adapting to the unexpected never entered my mind as the reality behind the process of becoming a mother. At 27, I married that tall guy. Our plan was to have our first baby after our first anniversary. And that’s when we started trying, but several negative pregnancy tests later, we ended up seeing a fertility doctor around our second anniversary.

After months of shots, pills, and acupuncture, I got pregnant. I was so excited I texted a picture of the positive test to my husband who had to contain his excitement as he sat on a train, commuting from his current job in Bridgeport to our current apartment in Manhattan.

The baby’s due date was the middle of August, which would make me a mother several months after my 30th birthday. I would be lying if I said becoming pregnant made me stop looking into the future to simply enjoy the day to day. Being a mother, my life dream, still involved a lot of waiting.

Adjusting to Reality

Flash forward to Mother’s Day, the beginning of my final trimester. My husband and I had just moved to Stamford and it was the first time my parents were visiting. It was a weird feeling for me, getting flowers and cards for being a quasi-mother. At some point, my father, who was battling colon cancer, excused himself to appreciate the silence of the empty nursery.

Shortly thereafter, my father was hospitalized. In the limited time I was at home, I would fill the nursery, savoring the nesting stage, letting myself slowly adjust to the reality that he would most likely never see me be a mother.

He passed away exactly five weeks before my daughter arrived. Her arrival, drawn out over the course of three days, started with a 40 week check-up and ended with an elective induction. I’ll spare you the dramatic details, all except letting you imagine me dancing on my terrace on a rainy summer night, rejoicing when magic was spoken: a delivery room had finally opened.

In those first seconds of being a mother, time did stop. The past, present, and future collided as I held my daughter, tangible proof of my dreams in constant motion.

The thing is, who we are and how we act as mothers, cycles back to our stories about becoming mothers. There is something in that prelude to motherhood that makes us pause and remember why, when, and how it all started.

For those of us who are pregnant more than once, that becoming stage happens again and brings forth a new perspective.

For me, becoming a mother for the second time was comical. I laughed as I stared at the positive indicator, surprised by how easily it happened. I laughed at the cruel joke of my restricted diet, which banned ice cream. And I laughed as my husband channeled Mario-Kart during the rainy drive from our new house in Norwalk to Greenwich Hospital.

Someday, I’ll share pieces of these stories with my children, but for now, I’ll just enjoy the everyday drama and comedy of being their mommy.