Newly Mothering

Yup, I’m on Facebook. Who isn’t? It’s kind of like Twitter…and sex…I go through phases. This week I am happy to announce that I’ve reconnected with an old high school friend. We’ve been Facebook “friends” for a little while but never really had much to say to one another. I don’t think either of us are particularly poised for rehashing our adolescent years at the all-girls’ boarding school we attended. Well, at least not without some margaritas in a dark mexican lounge with about 5 other post-boarding school babes surrounding us. (Hmm, that idea IS sounding a little fun right now though.)

On December 5th of our Junior year I was expelled from school. Yup, kicked out, tossed, banished. After finishing that year off at a public school and stepping foot into what would be a 5 year identity crisis situation (details not pertinent at this time) I did return to the boarding school as a day student. My connections to old friends changed. We’d grown distant. Or, I think, I was distant, they were them, I was somebody lost. In many ways.

Years went by. I stumbled. Much. I gained hope. I moved. I learned to live in the now without being so extreme. Things were good. I got pregnant. Big fat fucking oops!

But of all my oopses, it was the greatest one. And now here I am. A suburban Connecticut mom to three boys – someone who appears conservative-looking, I was told yesterday. After carrying, delivering and cursing out three children, it’s now fun for me to talk with new moms. There is something nostalgic about it already – which is ridiculous when you have a one year old at home – and I can remember the baby days of being a new mom and that fuzzy unknown feeling. A fullness I didn’t know how to categorize. Now I know what it is. Motherhood. And, simply, Family. My Family. A family birthed, quite literally, by  me. But 7 years ago I didn’t know what motherhood meant. Who I was. What was going to happen to me. How I would change. How I would stay the same. What I would love, and loathe, and miss about myself. It was an entirely new kind of identity crisis. I wasn’t lost. I was found. I just had to move in, get comfortable, settle down with a new me.

It all came back to me yesterday. Enter: Facebook. Lily and I most recently spoke when Jamis was a baby and I was on a getaway weekend to NYC. We hugged and laughed and drank a bit. It went by too fast. We were so different. I was a new mom living in Florida. She was brilliant and living in the city. Years have passed like lightning. I’m still a mom. Lily’s still brilliant. But now she’s a mom, too. Our chit chat can now surpass our memories of yesteryear. Those people we were. Because it’s an even smaller part of who we truly are once we become somebody’s mother. Once there are little toes and fingers, little eyes, little mouths, little teeny tiny sighs and sneezes and smiles.

It’s wonderful to feel this unity of motherhood. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s not celebrated enough.

me: How’s motherhood going for you so far? It’s crazy, isn’t it???

Lily: Oh man it’s indescribable. I did luck out with a baby who started sleeping through the night at 6 weeks, and is now logging 10 hours every night. I don’t know how that happened but I’m grateful. It’s funny, I almost feel guilty about it, like I should be suffering more, putting in dues, or something.

But there’s craziness nonetheless. More worry than I ever thought I could produce, more love than I ever thought I could handle, more laughter than I ever expected, and more wonder and confidence and curiosity than I’ve felt since I was a kid. Since high school really. It’s like I got a part of myself back, a part I didn’t really know I lost. And I also lost a part of myself, that I truly miss sometimes, the part that stays out until 5am and has drunken conversations with strangers about ridiculous things. But now those are replaced with babbly conversations with a smiling baby, and I don’t think I really lost out on this one.

She said it perfect. Honest. Just Right.

Lily and Penny