Motherhood is worth all the fear

A good friend of mine just told me she's having a baby. Well, she didn't exactly tell me. I heard the rumor almost 30 miles away and had to hunt her down to confirm it. I love small towns.

But beneath the laughter and excitement as we talked, I could hear a strain of something else, something that was all too familiar.

Panic.

No, not panic, really. It was more like ... terror. She's older than most first-time moms and she's grown comfortable in Life As It Is. Being one of the most intelligent people I've ever known, she's all too aware that Life As It Is is now Over.

I can remember the feeling, even though I was younger with my first one. I was used to spontaneous road trips, long hours spent with a good book, and being able to go places with nothing but a $20 in my back pocket and a good pair of tennis shoes. The first time we went somewhere after Scott was born, it was a family reunion over at Henry Horton State Park. My dear, darling, wonderful husband, who usually left all the baby-toting to me (he figured I did it so well the first nine months, why stop?) jumped out of the car, grabbed his first-born son and charged into the welcoming arms of aunts, uncles, cousins and a few bemused strangers who wandered into our group and were handed plates of food.

I climbed out (three weeks after a C-section, mind you) and gathered up the diaper bag, the blanket, a portable crib/playpen, a baby seat, the cooler with the back-up formula, and balanced carefully on top of it all, the squash casserole I'd gotten up between feedings to make. The $20 in my back pocket went to the local extortionists -- oops, I mean convenience store -- for gold-plated diapers because I'd forgotten to pack our ecologically responsible cloth diapers. (Those lasted about six months. Once he started on solid food, I gave up.) The comfortable tennis shoes were replaced with stretched-out denim espadrilles because my feet were still swollen from the pregnancy.

The solitary hours were over. Getting more than two hours of sleep at a time was over. In the depths of postpartum blues and sleep deprivation, I thought my life as a human being was over, too. Instead of Mary, aspiring writer, I was now the human milk cow and baggage porter.

It didn't help that I'd been terrified of having a baby, too. I didn't know anything about babies! Ask anyone I went to high school with and they'll tell you my life's ambition was to have a nasty little apartment in Manhattan where I'd write and illustrate comic books for Marvel. I would keep weird hours and weirder company and live an eccentric, Bohemian life with no husband, and no children.

Funny how things happen, isn't it? Silly little thing called love ...

I was afraid I wouldn't be a good mom. I think, deep down, every woman in the world has had that fear. Either we have great moms ourselves and we're afraid we can't measure up, or we have terrible moms and we're afraid we'll be just like them. I was a horseback-ridin', hell-raisin,' basketball playin' tomboy when I was younger. The only Barbie I ever played with was Skipper because her legs bent at the knees and I could make her ride my Breyer's horses. My only baby doll was Baby Tenderlove and I pulled out her hair so I could play Connect-The-Dots with the holes left behind.

What did I know about babies?

And then, oh horrors, those babies grow up! They become toddlers who like to put things in their mouths and choke. They like to pull dangerous objects off of shelves and get hit in the head. They wander away in malls and the run out in front of traffic -- they are 911 calls on the hoof and I, in no way, felt ready to take on the responsibility of getting one of the little danger magnets to live long enough to terrorize me with teenager mood swings.

But a funny thing happens on the way to postpartum. The doctors and nurses remove that animated bundle of malice that's been playing trampoline on your bladder for the last six weeks and using your ribs as a foot rest, and they put that bundle on your chest and it looks at you.

He looks at you. The lump that's bumped inside of you for nine long months becomes very real for the first time and the secret nurturer who has been hiding for years beneath the tomboy's Band-Aids and horseman's callouses comes bursting out like the Incredible Hulk, only triggered by love instead of rage.

He doesn't even have to be your own birth child. Born, adopted or fostered -- when a child is placed in your arms and you know he is yours to raise, he is placed in your heart as well. That's why parents -- good parents -- fight to protect their children in every way possible, because to lose that child is to lose your heart.

Sometimes the unimaginable happens anyway, no matter how good and careful the parents are, and I can't even pretend to know how devastating that is. The fact that some parents then have the strength to go on -- and even open up their hearts again, and the risk of losing them, to another child -- fills me with awe. I don't think I could do it.

But then, I didn't think I could be a good mom to begin with. I may be more Roseanne Connor than Doris Day, but for a Bohemian wannabe, I think I've done a pretty good job.

So will you, my friend.

-- Mary Reeves is a staff writer for the Times-Gazettte. She can be reached by e-mail at mreeves@t-g.com.