Posted By Daisy on July 13, 2010

If you ask me to pinpoint the moment my son became more to me than a primal responsibility, when my instinct went beyond protection and blossomed into love, I do not know that I could give you a straight answer.  It certainly wasn’t the fist smile.  I don’t think we ever knew for sure when the Bear’s first genuine smile was.  When you’re looking that hard for something, it appears everywhere, and then you begin second-guessing yourself anyway — was that a smile or did he just fart?  It wasn’t his first babbles either, but it was well before he said “mama” (and for a long while, “mama” didn’t really mean ME, it just meant “hey over there I need something”, aimed at anyone within hearing distance).

I suspect at first it was a creeping combination of the small things — a facial expression that reminded me of my husband, the first glimmer of his being pleased with himself for grabbing a ball, his obvious puzzlement over having managed to crawl backward under a piece of furniture without having devised a plan for getting back out.    It was seeing the wheels beginning to turn inside his little brain, turning in a way that could only be described as human.    As I became able to anticipate his reactions — “oh that’s too many people in the room, he’s going to freak out” or “don’t-pick-him-up-like-that-he-hates-that” or “no, no, don’t shield him from the wind, he loves to feel it blowing in his face” — when I began to know him intimately, and felt assured that in fact I knew him BEST — that was the point at which those dizzying new feelings grew exponentially and into love.

Now that he is older, it’s a special secret bond that continues to grow.  It is not the new direct communications, his ability to tell me that he loves me, or give me kiss, or ask for a hug, that make my heart skip…it’s his looking at me sideways with his mouth screwed into a tiny smile when a song he knows is my favorite comes up on the CD queue.  It’s private jokes, and private heartaches too — when I know he can feel free to let himself sob and sob over some tiny thing because he knows that I know he’s really crying about something much deeper.

I know there will be a turning point, when his need for independence will mean he’ll abandon some of these intimacies with me.    Until that time I will continue to bask in our jointly peeling back more and more layers of the amazing and uniquely different person that he is.

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Categories: Daisy's Story
Tags: baby, bonding, love, motherhood