I've been going through something lately, wavering constantly through a series of emotions that all (surprise) revolve around the birth of my daughter, around becoming a mother. I find so often that I am thinking in the future in an effort to better capture the present. I feel almost obsessed with the fact that Nahanni will so quickly be not my baby anymore, I think so much about her separation from me, it hurts me. I see young girls - any age - four, ten, fifteen; and I think that someday that will be her and I can scarcely comprehend it. I see teenaged girls walking down the street, plugged into i-pods, chatting on cell phones and I know that someday I will not understand my daughter, nor she me. It's like getting a broken heart from a guy you haven't met yet...and yet, I can't seem to stop thinking like this. I'm so often overcome by the intense feelings I have for this child, I ache for it. I love to look into her face while she sleeps, the sweep of dark lashes that brush the pale oval of her cheek. Her rosebud mouth, puckering and chatting in her sleep, the round curve of her brow beneath my palm. I feel crazy for the wide open grin that erupts from her face with every new thing she learns, you can see how proud she is of learning, how true is the joy in her face when she wakes up to you, when you make her laugh that gorgeous, tingly giggle that you would do anything to make her repeat. I live for these moments and I fear the time in the future when, like her frailest newborn days these moments fade into the foggy ether of time and I become the woman who yanks her by the arm in frustration, scolding her for whatever misdeed has tried my patience. Right now I live most of my time with her in a sort of dreamy bliss - I could stare at her for hours, studying the daily changes in the colour of her eyes, watching the shape of her eyebrows evolve, the crook of her wet smile, the dimples of her increasingly pudgy little hands, the roll of fat at her wrist. I can't bear to think of the time when she won't be my baby, when I won't be able to put her into the sling and hold to her my breast and feel her tiny fingers tickling my side as we walk. I feel like a buffoon, so inarticulate is my effort to put these feelings into words, the bricks and mortar of my love for this girl, this incredible gift of fate that she is.
I was lying with her tonight, she has been clingy all day and I finally just gave in and lay with her and turned on the tv and was delighted to find 'The Breakfast Club' playing on Encore - a movie that I still know most of the words to even after almost twenty years. It was so interesting to watch it with these new eyes, finding myself identifying with the Principal as much as the kids, remembering for myself what it was like to feel all the emotions of those days. To see those characters that I so understood as a teenager weep and cry and have hearts broken - and to look with these eyes, my mommy-eyes and knowing that the ache that I felt as a teenager, all that angst and emotion and fear and sadness and melancholy - all of it I still feel, only now it is caused by a tiny girl in orange footsie pyjamas. I guess emotions are the constants in our lives, it's just the causes that change.
I'd do it again though. I'd do it a thousand times just to know the joy that she has brought me - and I will risk it. I will risk the very crumbling of myself, of all that I know of myself, all the fears and pain and the crises of loving - all just to be with her. In some ways it makes me more fearless in life because I know that nothing on earth could hurt me in any way that approaches how she,or anything happening to her could. I used to think tragedy was what happened to you. Now I know that it is something happening to the one you love the way I love her.
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