Firstborn

January 26th, 2010
Mothering

My friend Kristin had a baby last week. Her first. A beautiful, beautiful daughter named Margaret. When I saw the photo I swooned. Now that my baby-making days are far enough behind me I’m free to thoroughly adore the babies of others, whereas a couple of years ago when the transition was still in process I had a difficult time enjoying them. Not because I would wish that the baby would be mine, but because I’d be terrified by the very thought. I’m relieved I can embrace babies again without feeling threatened. Especially now, with Maggie here to love from a distance.

Given my seemingly endless parade of sick kids these days, I’ve been looking for baby gifts online. I stare at the itty bitty caps and the plushy blankets and the soft, pastel-colored newborn toys, and I remember the time so many years ago–seventeen, in fact–when I was preparing for my firstborn’s arrival, and I wonder what Kristin’s initiation as a mother might be like. She’s my age–we were close high school friends–and I can’t imagine having lived all these years outside the boundaries of motherhood. Not because there’s anything inferior or unworthy about such a life, but because mine has been so saturated with babies since the dawn of adulthood that any other path seems fascinatingly foreign. Who would I be today if I’d made different choices in my twenties and thirties? Both Kristin and I have forfeited some experiences in order to have others. Now, at midlife, my friend is just beginning parenthood and I’m finding other meaningful and transformational opportunities for personal growth. I know I wouldn’t change the order of things in my own life if I could; I suspect she wouldn’t either. We’ve both been extremely lucky to have the luxury of choice, as well as the chance to be parents when we wanted to be.

I think of them often, this new mother and daughter just beginning to know each other. I remember the conflicting feelings I had when Elizabeth was born–the transcendent sense of expansion as well as the heaviness of responsibility. Just minutes after her birth it dawned on me that this person would be alive until her life was over, a logically obvious fact that came as a complete surprise. Within a day I gained the uneasy understanding that there are no real breaks in the work of motherhood, that even when the baby slept or was cared for by others I was mentally and emotionally occupied. It was an overwhelming realization at age twenty-one, and I’ll bet it’s equally overwhelming for Kristin at age thirty-eight.

But that daunting knowledge has a welcome flipside. I didn’t really see it until Elizabeth was a few months old, maybe four or five months, and had outgrown her new-baby bewilderment at finding herself in a body on this earth. My mother-love had been constant and fierce from the start, although mixed with plenty of ambivalence and even resentment as I attended to my daughter’s near-constant needs. But as she approached middle babyhood, something amazing happened: she began to emerge as a person. Not merely an incarnation of Everybaby, but a unique human being. She was herself, just as I was myself. And I realized with a deep flush of gratitude that I would have the pleasure of knowing her every day of our lives. It wouldn’t be all pleasure, of course, but at the same time it would be. For somehow, the difficulty and the joy were one and the same.

“She’s always here,” a mutual friend of ours once said when her firstborn was small, and her voice carried a measure of dismay, but also ineffable delight. With four children of my own by that time, I knew exactly what she meant.

And today I’m glad, so very glad, that Kristin will, too.

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