On Motherhood

I have started working again this week. Although, officially, I am due to report on February 6 yet. Since I miscalculated and came in last Tuesday, here I am reporting again for a meeting I had committed to.

Having been advised that I take advantage of the two more weeks left to enjoy my baby, I took Wednesdays and Thursdays off. It was a lucky break since Bee had told me beforehand that he had “extra” work on those two days. An ASEAN Tourism Forum is ongoing in the city which means lots of opportunity for his type of business. It meant some “night away from home” for him.

Anyway, here I am again dabbling with my computer and doing what I’ve missed doing the most – write. Being a mom is truly a rich experience. It is definitely something else. As I take on the role everyday, I get to realize a lot of things. As I had expected, motherhood is such an eye-opener to me in a lot of ways. It made me see myself “metamorphosing” into this person I never really imagined I could be. In a way, I am “witnessing” an entirely different way of my “becoming,” of the unfolding of my truth. After all, motherhood is not an experience that could happen to you everyday. It is an entirely different phase in one’s life. And I am in that phase now.

Motherhood also made me see my own Mom in a different light. I understand her better now, and am more tolerant of her moods. Most importantly, I now appreciate her much, much more than I ever did. Finding myself in her shoes now, I realized hers was not an easy job rearing and loving us with all our imperfections and shortcomings.

Being a kid, it’s easy to be idealistic – demanding a lot of things from our parents. As children, it’s so easy for us to have such high expectations on what parents should be. (Well, I did.) We usually would have such high standards. That is why, for some, when something goes wrong in their lives, it’s so easy to blame the parents for being so strict or being less so, etc. etc. (I did not blame my parents in any way though) But now, as a parent myself, I realized parenthood is such a difficult role to take on. There’s lots of balancing act to do, of weighing things carefully before acting on anything.

A few weeks into motherhood and I find myself fumbling and groping as I try to learn the ropes. And it’s not easy to just fumble or to conduct things in a trial and error manner. Why? Because there’s another life, another being to consider here. And it does not make it easier to realize that that being is such a tiny, little baby totally dependent on you. If you’d mess up – in your fumbling and groping – you would totally affect this little angel’s life. And for sure, I would not want to commit such terrible mistakes that could greatly affect my own baby’s life.

I am not perfect. For sure there will be mistakes along the way. I just pray and hope that they would in no way hamper my son’s own becoming in the future. Every time I watch him sleep or when we look at each other eye to eye as I feed him, I realize how tiny and how fragile he is. He is totally dependent on me. There is no way he could protect himself should I harm him in any way. And there's no way I would want to do that at all -- harm him, consciously that is. If there's something I want, it's to help him become the best that he could be, help him in his own becoming and in the process enrich my own becoming too. This, is such a tall order. I find myself on my knees the most nights just to ask for this...