Musing

Today was just another ordinary day. I started reading the sequel to a book I read so long ago, before I was a mom, called the Deep End of the Ocean. The initial book is about a family who loses their child to kidnapping. I have not, thank G-d, been through this, but the author's words really seem to bleed out at you. I could hardly read it. All I could think is, how differently this feels from reading the first novel before I was a mom.

Then, I was speaking to my friend, who has recently given birth. We were talking about how her first simple trip away from her newborn rocked her world. The timing, the vulnerability she felt in the car...I remember feeling much the same way. This new being depends on you to eat...you want to be there for every milestone...your life no longer belongs just to you.

At the library, we were at story hour. I am sitting at story hour with a couple of other moms, one very far along in pregnancy. She thinks that she may be in early labor and this prompts every other mom there to retell their own birth stories. Luckily, my toddler doesn't sit still for long, so my beloved AJ saved mommy from that conversation. I wish I could just hear these stories and not feel them...solely appreciate the miracle of what is and not the what could have been...I am getting there, but not there.

So, all of this, on this very ordinary day, in between laundry and pot roast and chitchat, I feel...heavy and vulnerable. Heavy with love and fretting and joy and fear for my children, vulnerable with the knowledge that they are my core, that protecting and nurturing them is so simple on a daily basis but full of potential pitfalls, humbled by the fact that a simple conversation can still bother me. Maybe I should start reading romance novels....