Somewhere in my meandering, I heard the words, “I’ve known him since he was an egg” and my imagination was off and running.
There was a moment…one of those universal moments that every mother experiences at some divine and horrifyingly thud moment, that I will always treasure, in all of its glory, and mutter ‘Oh Life.”
My husband and I were living in a tiny cottage on a grassy hill overlooking Lake Minnewashta, wedged in between a quarter horse farm and a who knows what on earth kind of farm.
Our baby daughter had been born in July, when the black flies and mosquitoes were having their hay day in Minnesota…doing their best to do their worst while the weather was not somewhere way below freezing. My husband was unhappy with his job, managing a fancy country club, which meant he worked late into the night, and collapsed when he finally got home.
Our bedroom was in an attic sort of loft, and baby Melanie slept up there with us, as did the husky and the collie.
Every night at the same time, Melanie woke up to nurse, and so I would lead the creeping parade downstairs so that I could rock in my nanny’s rocking chair for her midnight milk.
On this particular night, I put a Sarah Vaughan album on the record player, “Send in the Clowns”, with the dogs settling on either side of me, Melanie snuggled in to nurse, and I rocked.
Rock, rock, rock and as the baby tummy filled, her mouth slipped into soft sleepy rose bud stillness and so I carefully lifted her up to my shoulder to burp her.
Pat, pat, pat and PLOP right onto the floor in front of the collie. Every bit of milk that had been drunk was just earped up. The dogs looked at the plop. They looked at each other and ran out to the porch, and I sat there.
In that moment, an ‘OH MY GOD’ moment of “I am a mother and I am going to be a mother forever…or for at least the next twenty years, or thirty or forty, no forever. OH MY GOD.”
Our minds are so wondrously mysteriious. From “I’ve known him since he was an egg” conjuring Nanny’s rocking chair and Sarah Vaughan, and Maggie and Sasha(dogs) and the giant PLOP that represented motherhood commitment in the moment.
As Nanny used to say, in her English accent with a snifter of brandy at her side, “Ain’t life grand”.
Yes it is.