Elizabeth Stone said that deciding to become a mother is to
decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
There it is…your heart…bunched up with squishy features and
ruddy skin, all rolled into a bundle. Projectile vomiting in your fresh clean
sheets. Making suspicious rumbling noises right after a fresh change. Melting
you every time you look at those myopic
blue-ish eyes.
I might add, choosing motherhood is choosing to have
perpetually sticky floors and toilets that need to be flushed…or plunged. And
to have furniture that gets puked on or alternately, used to wipe cheese puff
fingers on.
Having just mopped the floor, rest assured that the red or
the purple juice will spill first, followed closely thereafter by the milk. And
in later years, drips of chocolate ice cream or green popsicles.
Napkins are poor substitutes for white shirts.
You will never feel more powerful than when your simple kiss
heals wounds.
You will never feel more powerless than when your kiss no
longer works.
Being a mother means having moments of panic when you
realize you may have ruined somebody else.
You will feel triumph when your child chooses the right and
does something truly compassionate.
You realize your capacity to feel pain increases
exponentially with each year of your motherhood…all pain: emotional, physical,
spiritual and so on
Joy floods your soul at unexpected moments, as does despair
Being a mother refines you in the fiery furnace of a breast
infection or in the midst of stomach flu. You learn you are stronger than you
thought you were, and weaker than you want to be. You understand that you would
break laws, both legal and natural, to save your child from harm.
Choosing motherhood means stomping around the house like Frankenstein
while little feet scramble away and little voices scream with happy wild
abandon.
You feel exquisitely happy and your heart breaks too many
times to count. But what does that matter? Your heart is no longer your own.
You gave it away willingly when you decided to become a mother.
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