Muses

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.

Image credit

 

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?

Mama’s Losin’ It

           

           

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