Big May

May is a big month for me now that I’m a mom. Well, it always has been an important month to me since I was born in May.

This year, however, May brings some firsts, and lasts.

This Sunday will be my last Mother’s Day as a mom to only 2 children. This month will also be the first time I will be a mother to three children.

There will soon be one more little body to love in our home. One more little personality to watch develop and grow into a little person who will alternately make me so proud that I cry and so mad that I cry.

It’s heady stuff, this being a mom.

I remember playing that I was a mom as a little girl. I remember thinking as a young adult that I might someday want to be a mom. Even when I got married, the concept of being a mom was rather abstract to me.

There is nothing that prepares you for what motherhood will be. It’s wonderful and scary and tiring and maddening and the greatest job in the world. I heard all about what others said it would be. But like many things, you can’t really know until you experience it.

I thought that I was a mother when I was pregnant with my first child. Technically, I was. But really? No. I wasn’t a mother until my child was born and in my arms depending on me to teach her how to exist in this world.

There is something in my heart that hurts just a little bit when my children seem to be actively defying my husband or me and then I realize that they just didn’t understand what we were telling them. If you’re a parent and your child is more than 2 years old, you’ve probably been there. Your child starts to cry because they’re scared about something that you just didn’t explain because you thought they understood.

That’s when you realize how important being a mom is. How much we have to teach our kids. How much they really just don’t know, and how scary that can make the world seem. How careful we need to be with little feelings.

A mom is a very powerful being to those who call her mom.

And soon, I’ll have the power to shape another life.
I only hope that I’m up for the task.