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She has just climbed down from her highchair, a small person with much on her mind. I bend down and begin picking up pieces of scrambled egg and toast she has dropped during her breakfast. Suddenly I feel arms around my neck. “Hug,” she says squeezing. I hug her back and laugh with pleasure, inhaling her baby smell. She finally lets go, steps back and solemnly lifts her face to be kissed. We kiss, and she goes. I am in love…

My mom wrote this about me when I was two years old.   The worn piece of paper, complete with what looks like a coffee stain, that she has scribbled her thoughts on, fell out of the pages of a book I was unpacking when I moved here to  the east coast after taking the job as a host at QVC.  Two years later, as I complete my move to a new, more permanent old house in the country, this now framed memory is one of the first things that goes on the shelf.

Every time I read it I feel like I am looking at an intimate moment.  I almost want to glance away and give that mother and daughter their privacy. But I cant. I crave that time, I want to remember what it feels like to slip my arms around my mother’s neck and insist on a hug. When did we stop doing that?  Why? 

What astonishes me is 33 years later in a different state, a different era, a whole different world, I feel those little arms around my neck and smell that baby smell nearly every single day.  I could have written this about my own little girls.  Grace and Georgia are now three & four years old and what made me gasp and the room started to spin when I first read this two years ago, is that this is a scene I experience nearly every single day.  Its almost scary how identical the domestic routine was back then in a mountain home in California, to mine each morning in a small farm house in Pennsylvania. 

I used to fight becoming my mother, don’t we all in some way? But, this small piece of paper is evidence it’s inevitable.  There are so many similarities, the good ones, which I am thankful for.  She gave me this insane sensitivity that causes me to cry daily, but it’s that same softness that makes us both great moms.  This month specifically I think of her and the loss we both share, the miscarriages that we each experienced which make us part of this huge sisterhood of women who have survived.  I wasn’t going to write about it, but when I was asked to write the mom-to-mom blog for September 30^th I felt it would be wrong not to acknowledge the date and the child.  September 30^th was my due date years before my children were born.  I lost that baby early on, and I am lucky, I only lost one, but every year the date sneaks up on me.  It usually hits me while I’m in the shower, one of the few moments in the day I get to actually be alone with my thoughts, and I remember the pain, easier with time, and think of where that 7 year old would be today. 

 

I’m in that time of my life when I have just become a mom and I am slowly loosing my own.  It is all together excruciatingly sweet and wonderful and painful and devastating.  It shouldn’t be happening this way.  My mom is young, but God has a plan, and in the last four years I have come to accept my moms illness and be grateful that she is still here, even if she isn’t the same person who wrote those lyrical words about the love of her life decades ago.    I walk past that piece of her heart every day and I am reminded of how much we are alike.  She was truly in love with me, as I am with my children. I know she still is, even if it’s a little harder now for her to express.  Love like that can’t be erased even by the cruelest brain injury.

I’m not alone, even if I don’t have anyone close to me who is in my same situation, I know so many are.  You are out there, raising young children without the direct influence and support of the woman who raised you, or trying to navigate that in between time where you are parenting your own kids and caring for your parents as well.  Some never even had the love of a woman like I have. I’m blessed, I have a step mom, aunts, a mother in law and friends who have stepped in and filled, even over filled, that void that is created when a young woman doesn’t have her own to help her understand becoming a mom.  These days I spend more time being thankful for my situation and the fact that mom is still here to enjoy, in her own way, her grandkids, than mourning the fact that I don’t have that same brilliant, artistic, crazy-in-love woman in my life anymore.

But in a way I do.

These eleven lines of cursive are my mom.  I can see the little girl because she looks back at me every day I wake up to my three year old. 

 I can smell that sweet baby scent on my own girls, that space between the chin and chest that I inhale daily as if it’s the only air I can breathe.  I feel the arms of my four year old who insists, in the same words, as I did as a child, “hug,” day after day.  More than see, I almost inhabit that mother.  I am her.  Kneeling down to pick up eggs and toast, my girls favorite breakfast,  all the same frustrated from lack of sleep and crazy toddlers and overwhelmed with love and gratitude that these little beings are mine.  Even if my mom couldn’t explain to me how to survive the loss of a child and even though she didn’t stand next to me in the first few days as I finally became a mom and teach me how to bathe my baby, or the right way to put on a diaper, she left behind instructions in the words she wrote.   Even if I hadn’t found this special moment captured in pen and paper, she would still be teaching me.  She did teach me.  I have become her in the best ways and every time I see her I am blessed.  Off she goes, I am in love….

 Hope you are intimately present in all the highs and lows of motherhood.  Share your story with me below. How do you treasure every moment?  And follow my story of infertility, adoption and motherhood on my facebook page – www.facebook.com/kerstinlindquistqvc . 

Have a blessed mommy day!

Kerstin