Mother's Day

Mother's Day is traditionally a day for our children to celebrate us.  But as mothers, it's also a day to appreciate the rewards of bringing another human being into the world and watching them thrive. 

I was very late to the game, almost forty.  I never considered having a child while unmarried; doing it by choice was pretty much unheard of at the time.  Today, knowing how much having a daughter has enhanced my life, I wouldn't want to miss out on motherhood.  If I wasn't married and my window was closing,  I'd like to believe I'd do whatever was necessary to make it work.     

Motherhood changes us.  It pushes our boundaries while also bringing us back to our basic instincts. Until we have that tiny, helpless creature in our arms, our world pretty much revolves around ourselves, as an individual and as a couple.  Suddenly our horizons broaden, the world becomes a bigger, scarier place.  Our otherwise competent selves are unprepared for the feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty.  The sense of responsibility and desire to protect can be overwhelming.  We find ourselves vulnerable as we've never been before.  It's all very humbling.

Nothing prepares us for it.  Having younger siblings, babysitting, working in a child-oriented field, none of it has the soul-gripping affect that our own child has on us.  As our children learn and grow, we learn and grow along side them.  We're all works-in-progress.  It can be a steep learning curve, lots of joys and challenges.  And we do make mistakes.  Our only hope is that our children feel the unconditional love that is full-to-bursting inside us.     

And it never ends.  No matter how old, independent, self-sufficient and secure our children become--even having children of their own--they will always be our children.  We'll always worry about them and be emotionally vulnerable.  As the quote says, "Mothers are only as happy as their least happy child."  We can't help ourselves.  

As mothers, we carry our children in our hearts forever, figuratively and literally.  When a woman carries a child in her womb, cells from that tiny growing organism cross into her body and remain there for the rest of her life, genetically distinct from her own.  They move through the circulatory system and have been found in her heart, her brain, her bones and in almost every tissue.  Mothers carry fetal cells from every pregnancy in their bodies.  

It's called microchimerism--a concept discovered in the 1960s.  The most common form of microchimerism is fetal→maternal, where cells from a fetus pass through the placenta and establish themselves within the mother.  Maternal immune cells are also found in offspring, and this form of microchimerism is called maternal→fetal, though this phenomenon is only half as frequent.

Children never really leave their mothers, not completely.  Even when they're out on their own in the world and the house is quiet, they are still here--in our hearts, in our cells--in the deepest parts of us.  They don't just leave their imprint on our souls, they actually leave pieces of themselves within us,

forever.