First and foremost, I’ve made way too many mistakes in my lifetime to have ever done anything right enough to deserve the kids that I have. My kids are x, y, and z. Fill in the blanks! Take your pick! My kids are everything in the whole world to me. I could truly walk out my front door and leave it all behind, as long as I had the kids with me. They’re everything. I think this is pretty obvious – this is how the human race has survived for all of these years. Moms love their babies, Duh! But for me to even try to begin describing my children is nearly impossible.
When my second baby was born, I recall sitting on the couch, wondering what I had done right to deserve the two lovely, perfect children I was given. Why didn’t I suffer a loss? Why wasn’t something wrong with them? How are these things decided? I swaddled baby Kajsa in her flannel and squeezed her tight. She was so doll-like. She weighed nothing – a little less than a gallon of milk. I knew a man whose wife’s first baby was stillborn. I knew a family who lost a 5-year old to a head injury. My neighbor lost a baby a few weeks before he was due. Someone I know from work lost a baby that was only a few days old. I have loved family and friends and lovers with a fierce passion (of differing and appropriate amounts and levels, of course) but nothing prepared me for the vulnerability, the passion, and the intensity with which I loved these two small creatures. The possibility of losing a baby or a child feels absolutely impossible to fathom. And with complex pregnancies and premature children, I faced this fear blindly with my first child (because I wasn’t familiar with the bonds between the mom and her baby) and with total, crippling, cold terror for my second baby. I knew the love I was about to experience, the fierceness, the swift nature of it. I knew how tightly I’d be held by the love, and I knew I was borderline unworthy of that passionate, all-consuming feeling. And I knew that I could also lose her. In that sense, the second pregnancy was infinitely harder than the first.
I sat on the couch, that fall evening, and wept, holding her tightly. At that moment, I couldn’t tell you how much money was in the bank, where I worked, or what day it was. All that mattered in the world was the small miracle in my arms and her big brother, who I once held in the same way. The love you feel for your children is blinding. Stunning. Gigantic. Frightening. Dan, I think, was aware of the hormone storm that was my post-baby body, and kissed me on the forehead. I recall being genuinely baffled at our dumb luck. Though not perfect by the measure of others, my children are the perfect children for me. I can’t believe how well matched they are to me. “Do you think we deserve them?” I asked him.
In hindsight, all silly-ish decisions are sillily magnified to a level of silly that can make us roll our eyes, blush, and even be willing to spend our future genie wishes erasing all of that silly right out of our pasts. Right at this moment, as my baby is now 13 months old, and not 13 days old, I just find this question a little bit downright silly. Super silly. But if I put aside my embarrassment at the silliness, it’s a question that has the potential to keep me present and grounded. Do I deserve these kids?
Do I deserve them. What a magnificent thought to ponder. I suspect that this question alone will make me better at parenting than any book could. Am I a person with virtue? Do I have life skills that are worth imparting to my children? Would I be proud if my kids turned out like me? What would I make my children like if I had some choices? Have I lived a life that should have handed me the two tiny miracles I’ve been given? A certain level of unworthiness, as parents, I’ve found, has enabled us to parent two tiny creatures very comfortably. In a daily quest to live up to the children we’re lucky enough to have been given, we usually fall quite short! Of course, we accidentally step on the baby’s hand, we let the toddler watch a little too much tv, and we get angry during the 2nd hour of the toddler refusing to go to sleep and screaming from his room, “Get BAAAACK here!!!!!” For the 75th night in a row. But without the idea of being the parents that are best suited to these kids, without the daily effort to “deserve these kids,” our parenting performance could slip. We could become complacent. We could find ourselves at parent-teacher conferences saying things like, “I was the same way and I turned out fine.” We could find ourselves answering that exhausting question, “Why?” with “Because I said so.” Good parenting is difficult. Living up to your kids, honoring their need for wonderful parenting, and raising your own bar to a standard just outside of your reach is exactly why you do deserve the kids you have.
My mother-in-law used to criticize people who wanted to have “babies.” I might be mis-quoting this, but she said that her observations were that some people are out to have babies, not a family, not children, not humans who will grow to be your closest friends. It reminded me of how some people want a wedding and some people want a marriage. As someone who had always wanted kids, and was sure I wanted them for the right reasons, I just figured she was talking about “everyone else.” Her comments had no immediate impact on me when she made them. I thought I understood what she meant, but I thought it didn’t apply to me.
I realized soon after my first baby was born that there is nothing in the whole entire universe (universe, I say!) that could possibly prepare someone for the love that one feels for their baby. And the metamorphosis that occurs is gripping. As I was finally able to see moments in my life in the far distant future, I finally realized what she meant. She meant that this is the person who I will hold in my arms today and take to the pumpkin patch as a toddler, and take to Kindergarten in just a few short, sweet years. But harder to envision during the baby stage… this is the person who I will photograph for prom, help move to college, console after break ups, walk down the aisle, and even one day witness becoming a parent himself. He’s a baby for such a brief time, a child for a while, and an adolescent so briefly. But he will be a part of my family for the rest of my life. Most of that time, he will be one of my best friends in the world.
Oh. That’s what she meant. Of course he’ll be an adult one day. What a basic thought, yet so profound. I hope he will count me as one of the people he loves most in the world, as I count him. After watching my mom pass, and thinking more about family love and generations, it was a humbling thought to realize that this is exactly how much my mom loved me, and how much her mom loved her. Those two relationships had strains and at some points, even fractures. The question of “Do I deserve this child?” is an important one. It’s one that will help an unseasoned mom steer through an unknown and rocky terrain. Motherhood is so gigantic to a new mom. It reminds me of how people must have felt before knowing that the world was round. To have an idea of something, only to find out humbly, overwhelmingly, and all at once, that there is little to nothing that you actually knew about it. That’s what bringing home your first baby is. No, wait. What word could possibly describe this love’s magnitude, but magnify it by infinity? That’s what it is. You realize the seriousness, the exponentiality, and the miracle that has been handed to you. And there’s no interest (or possibility) of ever changing that love that’s now the very fabric of your soul. This love has now come to define you.
Do I deserve them. Will I work tirelessly to be the best mom I can be? That will insure that at times I’m not sure whether or not I deserve them, I’ll assess my own parenting to suit the needs of my kids. I’ll check in with my parenting and I’ll wonder what I can do better. I’ll open up authentic dialogue with my friends and family about parenting. The days won’t pass without notice, without present parenting. The relationship will gradually evolve from the teacher/mentor/parent to the guide/model/parent, and eventually I’ll become the confidant/friend/parent. I’ll work tirelessly to be the parent whom my kids need, and I’ll be rewarded with long-lasting bonds with my children.
When Dan kissed my forehead on that lovely day, tears draining, baby snuggled in tight as women have done since the dawn of time, a bond that’s indescribable, yet comprises our human experience and is a bond shared with women throughout history, I was surrounded by the clutter that is the life of a new mom. Gift elements stretched all around me in a sea of consumer love from our supportive friend and family circle. I’m sure I would not have been able to tell you the last time I showered. I doubt I wore clean undergarments. I can’t tell you what I ate, who cleaned the kitchen, or whether or not there was dust on the kitchen floor. I assure you, toys were spread all around me, in toddler-specific real estate selfishness. But the four people in the entire world to me were in this living room. Myself and my partner, and the two miracles we made. I know Dan was placating me somewhat. He lived through a hormone storm after the first baby that left him prone to use extreme caution. I’m not entirely sure my question was fully storm-related. Long since the hormones straighten themselves out, I still hope that we deserve these two kids.
“Yes. We do.”
I think we might. He might be right. And if it’s close, I’ll die trying to be the best parent I can be for them.
Though it’s not my style, I sat still and held that baby, envisioning the mom I wanted to be to her. I daydreamed about the day I watch her go to high school, the drive to drop her off at college, and cheesily enough, walking her down the aisle. I knew it was my hormones that allowed my body to create this child, and these miraculous soldiers were the same ones throwing me under the bus, prompting me to ask such a question out loud. How embarrassing. But perhaps those chemicals and the changes that they promote in us help us know what our children need, and perhaps my personal musings that day helped form the mom that this baby needed. I like to think that they bridged a gap between who I thought I could be based on reading all of the parenting literature for my first round of parenting and the natural ease of the parent I could be if I just allowed myself to just be myself. On that day, I began listening to myself. I opened up a conversation about the luck we clearly have for getting to be these kids’ folks, and what choices we can make as parents to fully deserve them.
On that day, I started to give brief spells of authorization to myself to allow the book knowledge to sneak out as I let my daughter and myself determine what were logical solutions to our troubles. I observed three distinct cries in her. Tired, hungry, and diaper cries (that I had actually read about, but hadn’t yet observed) became so distinct to me that it blew me away when I saw loving and helpful people like my husband and my mother-in-law making her a bottle of breastmilk when she was clearly poopy, plopping her down for a change when it was clear that she wanted to nurse. Baffling… except that that’s what mistakes I made (nonstop) with my first. I never knew what he wanted. I tried. I felt like parenting was this job for which I was not cut out. I let her sleep when she was tired, eat when she was hungry, and play when she seemed alert. I snuggled her nonstop. Every time I held her in my arms, I appreciated every fleeting moment.
Over the next several months, I observed that Dan was right. Yes, we do deserve them. The kindness, the joy, the cuteness, and the myriad of other wonderful qualities in these kids is a joy that yes, my husband and I fully deserve. We are great people and our kids are great people, too. The effort we put into parenting them pays off for us indescribably. We are trying every day to be the wonderful, kind, stable, supportive people that they deserve. And when we parent them with full presence, with attentive love, and when we mirror their love, we truly deserve to have become the parents of such amazing people.
