A Mother’s Love

Thirteen years ago today, I became a mum for the first time. I was nineteen years old, newly married and, until my daughter came along, thought of myself as very grown up and responsible.

But I will always remember the feeling of sheer panic that completely overtook me when I got home and my beloved had to return to work, leaving me alone with our baby for the first time…

She was tiny. Born at just 6lbs 6oz, her weight had dropped to just below 6lbs before we brought her home. She had the most perfect olive skin and a tiny rosebud mouth. Precious jet black kiss-curls covered her head, and her miniature hands curled around the edge of the cellular blanket as her small chest rose and fell with each intake of breath into those brand new lungs. I looked at this beautiful sleeping babe… and felt terrified.

I decided at that very moment that a God or a benevolent creator or a mindful universal presence couldn’t possibly exist, because the care of this exquisite infant had just been trusted to me. And if they did exist, what on earth were they thinking of!? I wasn’t responsible enough to look after her, to give her what she needed – I was barely managing to do that for myself!

And then, as I looked at her with a growing sense of panic, she opened those ebony eyes and looked right at me, right into me… and then my whole world just kind of fell into place. I picked her up, held her close to my chest, and then got on with being her mummy.

Throughout all the years from then till now, I have very consciously told her and her brothers how much they are loved. I’ve always made sure that they grew up knowing that they had a safe, loving, non-judgmental space where they could ask their questions freely, share their fears without shame, and where hugs were always freely available.

You see, I was very lucky to have a wonderful mentors in these matters – my own parents, who nurtured me to love freely, create abundantly and to stand strong in my sense of my self. I know that many are not so blessed as I am, and so I appreciate all the more the fact that I got so lucky.

Last night, I got to the part of The Time Traveler’s Wife where Clare discovers the poem her mother had written for her years previously, and Henry says,

I think about my own mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon, smiling at our reflection in a shop window, twirling in a blue dress across the floor of her dressing room. She loved me. I never questioned her love. Lucille was changeable as the wind. The poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a snapshot of an emotion. p330

Reading that passage makes me more determined than ever that my children will never need that kind of reassurance. That they will always know that I love them, that I am grateful that they chose me as their mummy, that I am so humbled that I get to be the one to see them grow day by day into the most beautiful, tender-hearted, creative individuals.

When I die they may indeed find poems written about them, but they will never need to look to those poems as necessary evidence that they were loved. That knowledge is bone deep, entwined into the code of their DNA, and needs no confirmation. I am passing on the gifts that my parents gave to me.

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