Trying To Describe the Love You Feel...

The love you feel for your child...trying to describe it... futile, but I'll try...

A woman I work with, that I really don't know very well, when she learned that I had had a daughter... this woman had to call me to discuss a work related issue, but when she got me on the phone, she gushed about me having had a child... "Isn't it like when you have met your most perfect boyfriend and you just can't wait to see him and relive every experience--every little detail with him--but it is like that every day?"And another woman's web journal that tried to describe it as a "big old flapping bird in your chest." It is both of those, but more... it is taking a fussing little girl with a weight, and a mass, and a heft to her that blows you away because she grows so much each day before your eyes, and then this fussy, stiffened child melts into a soft sleeping innocence within your arms as she falls asleep, and you see her face relax into something truly indescribable and beautiful beyond words that have yet been conjured on this earth and you want to hug her so hard that you pull her back inside of you (but you can't)... and you put her into her safe, sweet crib that was your momma's when she was a baby and you feel something that chokes you and frees you all at the same time. You catch your breath because you didn't know you could ever feel this for another living thing. And you love her father more than words can say, and watching this man that you love so very much love this daughter that the two of you have created with your love, and then those moments alone with her-whether she's sleeping or concentrating on a toy she just discovered but has been there for weeks or smiling or being excited to see you first thing in the morning...

And then you catch an episode of Dr. Phil (oh, stop it... I can't help myself) about nannies who abuse babies--with video of course--and you feel without thinking it, that if anyone ever did that to this child of yours, you could literally put your hands to them and tear them bloodily limb from body and feel only that it was deserved and necessary--oh, God, I can't even go there.

And so this baby that you worried and stressed over because when you're 42, so so many things can go wrong, and then you are bestowed with this most perfect depiction of a child that anyone has ever seen, and you realize that every single tiny bit of input that she will receive will come from you and the man that you love most in the world, and she is this peaceful, graceful, pure spirit that fills you up--I'm serious when I say you can physically feel it in your core--comes into your world...