Babies are a pain to deliver. It’s a painful, thankless job and anybody who thinks otherwise has never tried to push six and half pounds of chubby, limbs through a …my ten-year old son has been threatening to read my blog so I won’t complete that sentence! But the fact remains. You grunt, you push and after nine months of carrying live flesh in your body, you finally eject. And what does everyone do? Head straight for the baby! No applause, much less the standing ovation you expect. Your fate left in the hands of a perverse nurse, the adoring crowds all head for the baby like fireflies to a fire. Until it poops of course. Then they hand it right back. But that comes later. Much later.
First they all get him gifts. Him! What did he do. All he did was be born. Yeah, yeah, that’s not grammatically correct. Do you really want me to repeat the sentence with the pushing etc?
So there’s all these nice baskets of clothes and toys and other dreamy stuff – and its all for the baby! All you get are some flowers and maybe some chocolates that you know you shouldnt eat.
Soon its feeding time. Not yours dummy. The baby’s. Nobody cares if you’ve been fed or not. Just get that bawling bundle to stop wailing and feed the baby! What kind of a mother are you anyway? you want to do things like sleep and eat and rest??? Reaallly!!
The pain of labour is one of the most quickly forgotten pains of life. If you need proof of that just look around and see how many mothers continue to procreate, sometimes not even giving it a gap of one year. Babies spilling out of them annually like ketchup from a bottle of Heinz. And once you are a mommy, you are a mommy forever.
My mother, at 68, still clicks pictures of me when I’m wearing new clothes at 38!
She worries about my brother’s meals when he has an entourage of servants at his command.
And both of us still quiver when she gets that particular look in her eyes. She doesn’t even need to follow it up with “If you do that again…!”
And that’s what being a mommy is about. It’s free. It’s forever.
And sometimes, if you are worth a mother’s salt, it’s about forgetting the pain and letting go, just standing there and watching them as they fly and soar!
What do you think?