The day I started yelling at malfeasing boys in strange cars.
Yep.
You go bopping along 30 years of life and then someone puts a newborn in your arms.
This same baby you felt kicking and scratching inside of you a day ago.
Hello baby.
What am I supposed to do with you?
Once again I’m linking up with MamaKat’s Writer’s Workshop and I’m choosing prompt number 1) Share a parenting moment where you really began to realize what this mothering thing is all about.
* * *
I had this baby.
I figured out how to feed him and change him.
I never could figure out to keep him from looking like a dead baby bird in his car seat. (Looking back, I think it was because I kept the seat at too steep an angle for his little weak neck to stay upright.)
I was mostly going through the motions.
Oh, I loved him. But I felt as a baby sitter, a caretaker — wondering when some professional wearing a green smock would put a hypodermic needle in my body (still carrying 10 plus pregnancy pounds) and shoot me with the Mommy virus.
Then one day I was leaving Kroger pushing my new little charge/dead baby bird in the cart to the car.
SCREEEEECCCCHH.
A car whipped around a corner and down the aisle of cars lined as Dominoes.
“SLOW DOWN!” thundered out of the depth of my quaking torso.
I hated that boy driving that car. If my eyes shot out lightening bolts, he would be a pile of grey ash.
What just happened?
An awareness started oozing all through my body feeling all warm and tingly as if someone had just injected me with dye for a MRI.
How care that young fool race around in a 2000 lb. death mobile endangering my child!
My child.
Not the cute, wrinkly producer of dirty diapers. Not the crying, scrunched-up red face. Not the baby bird with the broken neck.
My son who I cared whether he lived or died more than I ever thought humanly possible to think about myself much less another being.
Yep.
That’s when I knew I was a mom.
How about you?