a love letter to my first-born

In a sense, all mothers grow up with their first child. The days are marked by so many shared milestones.

The first time you can’t get them to stop crying all night. The first time they smile at you. Their first fever. The first time you work up the courage to bathe them (terrifying). The first time you take them to the hospital (even more terrifying). The first time you think your arms will actually fall off from holding them so long, but you don’t dare move a muscle because they are finally asleep, so you decide that, ok, my arms belong to you now.

All of these firsts you experience together, continuously becoming a new version of the same two-some from one day to the next.

When I look at this picture of me holding you, eyes shut against the sun, arms as tired as my mind, I see a baby and a girl. I see someone who has barely scratched the surface of all those firsts. Someone who has just begun a lifelong education—with their greatest teacher by her side.

For me and you, our start to this crash course in mama and child was particularly dramatic. I had severe pre-eclampsia and they had to induce me early or risk both of our lives. Your first few months I fed you round the clock, waking you every two hours religiously. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was terrifying and lonely; it was a crash course in love and devotion and sacrifice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those early days lately. Of holding you in my arms, when you were so unspeakably tiny, like a baby bird. Maybe it’s because the present is a hard season for us, and I’m drawn to recall all that we’ve been through so far. All the uncharted waters we’ve been through together, all those firsts.

At the moment, there is so much unknown, and so many new feelings to navigate. So many milestones it feels like that have been unexpected.

Yet through it all, I’ve seen glimmers of your empathy that are so magical, they astound me. You are quick to tell your little sister “it’s okay—I’ve felt like that before too” when she gets frustrated at not being able to climb the stairs. You can sense my sadness, too—you sniff it out like a bloodhound even when I try my best to hide it. You wrap your arms around me and tell me I’m doing a good job.

But you are only four. You need boundaries and structure and tools to help you regulate your own emotions. You push the limits, perhaps to make sure that I will stay. There are days when it feels like you scream at me all day long, days when your anger feels like it knows no end. Days when I can’t calm you down. Days when I lose my temper. Days when I question everything. Days when I cry myself to sleep after I’ve tucked you in. But the hardest times are when I see in you parts of the child I was, too.

I was the child who would hide under her bed because those big feelings that I had so often seemed like they might break me. I was the child who felt so ashamed for her emotions that I often settled for a feeling of permanent loneliness which still creeps back in if I’m not careful. It’s a voice that tells me I don’t belong anywhere. That I don’t deserve anything. That I’m too much for anyone.

And when I see a flicker of that in you too, when it seems like your own feelings threaten to overwhelm you like that, all I want to do is hold you again like a newborn, until my arms break, and remind you that you have nothing to be ashamed of. That there is no reason to hide.

Though it can be heavy to be a deeply-feeling person—and particularly a deeply-feeling girl—I’m here to remind you that this depth is a form of magic.

No, this isn’t the plot of Frozen (though maybe, at this point, my subconscious is largely made up of Elsa metaphors). It’s just common sense. Your capacity to feel sadness and anger may be vast, but conversely, so is your capacity to feel joy. To feel wonder. I have seen it in your eyes, the way your face lights up when we watch a monarch butterfly or spot the mother robin who’s made a nest outside our window.

You see things in ways that others don’t.

You have a supreme capacity for delight.

It’s taken me many years to understand this about myself, and all I can hope is to help you accept your wide range of feelings, too. It’s why I tell you “your feelings don’t scare me” (thank you, Dr. Becky, for giving me a mantra I needed when I was little). Why I have you recite positive affirmations about the strength of your mind and your heart. Why I try to buy books with strong female protagonists who love and accept themselves. Because it’s taken me too long to do the same, and all I can hope is that you get there sooner than me.

All I can do is try to show you by example that you are precious and worthy of kindness and love and understanding. That you should never be made to be ashamed of yourself. That you don’t have to bend until you break to make other people like you, or to feel like you belong. That you should never have to convince someone that you’re worthy.

To remind you that I will always be with you, even on days where you scream that you don’t love me, or on nights when you’re filled with nightmares. On mornings when we change socks three times to get a pair where the seam doesn’t bother your toes and elicit tears. On afternoons where you feel like hiding from all of this—I’ll be there to help you come out from under the bed and into the light. To remind you of your magic.

And I’ll do it all imperfectly, might I add, because I haven’t completed this education that you’ve kicked off. I’ll do it with messy hair and coffee breath. I’ll do it while not always saying the right thing. While occasionally losing my temper. While being a human who sometimes feels lonely and sad, and other times feels joy and wonder. But I’ll always keep trying. And I’ll always be there to hold you.

Even as my arms break, babe.

x

mama