“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”
- Gore Vidal
"It was the last thing I ever expected: to look down into the face of my tiny newborn daughter and see myself. Her dark liquid eyes, amazingly alert and surprisingly aware, focused on me and I felt like I was looking into a mirror. The features were so similar, more similar than I thought possible for a baby this brand new. But yet there was more to it than that. More than physical resemblance. More than seeing all my faded baby photos wrapped up into a swaddled bundle. There was something deeply spiritual about looking at my child and recognizing myself.
For nine months I had been constantly aware that the child I was carrying would be a perfect blend of 46 unique chromosomes; 23 of them mine, 23 of them my husband's. So I knew she would resemble us, of course. I just never figured I’d see it so clearly and so instantaneously in the moment we first met.
Before giving birth, and despite the intimacy of having her inside me for so long, my child was a vague, shapeless, mystery to me. Much like the fuzzy ultrasound pictures I spent hours analyzing, I imagined her in shades of muted grays, with indistinct features and strangely opaque limbs. I assumed, knowing nothing but the inside of my uterus and communicating with what existed outside of it through a very limited vocabulary of swift kicks to my bladder and restless midnight acrobatics, that she would come out a virtual blank slate. Like bread dough maybe; with all the ingredience incorporated but requiring kneading and molding and baking.
However, I find that she knows exactly who she is. And it is I who am more like raw, unworked bread dough; suddenly full of doubts and questions and insecurities. Can I mother this child? Am I capable? Will I know what she wants, know what she needs? Will I be able to love her enough?
So maybe, it is not myself I see after all. It is her. As clearly as though I have been looking all my life I see her..."
I wrote this in the days following Elliott's birth. I cannot tell you which day, because what with all the changes being a new mother brings and all of the sleep that gets left behind the days blended into one. Indeed, since becoming a mother I am finding more and more that the years all seem to blend into one. My Peaches, as I call her, my once tiny-little-always-moving-rarely-sleeping baby girl is truly no longer a baby. Or toddler. Or in her terrible twos. Or threes. She is no longer even four. As of tomorrow. And on the one hand I find it incredibly wonderful that the small bundle they so naively sent me home from the hospital with has grown and flourished and thrived. And each day is becoming more and more a person I am so grateful I get to know. And yet on the other hand, I feel like I merely glanced away for one second and quite suddenly she is turning five. I have to remember and resolve...no more glancing away!
