I was going through some of my old {really old} writings that I had posted back in the day when Myspace was just starting on the map. After about an hour of trying to remember my old login information I came across this post.
Nowadays I don’t usually write about stuff that is so “serious” and I tend to not post something unless it can make me laugh. But today, I guess I am feeling a bit emotional. My baby just turned 2 and my oldest son will be 6 soon and it’s had me thinking about all the memories I’ve had and the love that I’ve given that I never thought I had…
thus for this post today…
“Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible.”
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“I was once told that I couldn’t understand because I didn’t have children. A friend at work had been granted yet another personal day because her child was sick, and I felt it was unfair. I was offended by what she said, and somewhat resentful at being excluded from a club to which, at the time, I didn’t even want to belong.
I thought about this the other night as I was rocking my son to sleep, trying to hide the tears streaming down my face at the thought of losing him.
I know now that my friend was not inflicting judgement on me. She was merely stating a truth. People who don’t have kids simply can’t understand what it’s like to feel what parents feel. Now that I do understand, I’m still not sure sometimes that I want to belong to the club. Loving someone this much is frightening.
And in retrospect, it’s something I’ve never truly done before.
It’s not that I haven’t always envisioned how it should be — pure, unconditional, eternal — because I have, and I’ve certainly had love in my life. Reality, though, is not always so kind. Relationships don’t always work out, and after enough time and enough disappointment you learn, perhaps even unknowingly, to just give a part of yourself instead of the whole. That way when the ending inevitably comes, you’ve got something left.
Then you make this little human being and bring it into the world, and maybe for a few weeks you can keep your distance because, after all, you’re just getting to know each other. But slowly, slowly you start giving away pieces of your heart that you had forgotten existed, until one day you realize you couldn’t survive if something happened to them. And you understand.
And it’s not even just the thought of losing them. It’s watching them change before your very eyes, knowing somehow that the acknowledgment of how fast they are growing won’t slow down the time. Knowing that pictures from just yesterday can make you weep and long to go back. Knowing that the little sleepers that they are already outgrown will forever represent an idyllic period of their life to which you can never return.
It’s calling the doctor in the middle of the night because they have a fever, terrified of what you did wrong; the guilt of feeling responsible every time they get a sniffle or an earache or cries when you don’t know why. It’s the sleepless nights holding them so tight because comforting them, sometimes, is all you can do. It’s checking on them every five minutes to make sure they are breathing in the their crib.
It’s the need to protect them at all costs, and knowing that you simply can’t; the overwhelming sadness that someday very soon they are going to walk out the door and you won’t be there to save them from life’s cruelties, hurt and grief and pain from which you couldn’t even protect yourself.
It’s trying to memorize every pout, each gentle sigh, how they hold their tiny hands in front of their face in such complete awe, the bashful way they look at you and smile and burrows into your shoulder to sleep, knowing with a kind of bittersweet ache that these moments are as fleeting as snowflakes on their little cheek.
It’s knowing that for the first time in your life you simply don’t care about you, that nothing is more important than their health and happiness. Knowing that you would give your own life, never to see or hold them again, if it could guarantee their own life. It’s knowing, finally, the meaning of true love, and fearing that it will be taken from you.
I once said that having my child was the hardest thing I would ever do, but I now understand that I was worng.
Loving them is.”
Every Day In April 
You said it!