Everybody's Mother
When Theo was a baby, I often thought of all the other unseen babies. While I was walking the floor with Theo during the night, watching the hands of the clock go around hour by hour, I would think of the many babies crying and keeping their parents awake in the houses and cities around us, of the hospital rooms with women in labor. My ears rang with all the imagined (and real) crying.
And when we had a morning routine for going to daycare and work, I thought of all the alarms going off and sleepy parents getting up and everybody getting dressed and getting on with things whether they wanted to or not. Packing up lunches and things to take with them and leaving their warm homes to go out into the cold and rain.
And then the bedtime routine. I remembered babysitting my first niece when she was little and not wanting to go to bed. “It’s nighttime now,” I intoned in my storytelling voice. “All the foxes are curled up in their dens, all the birds are on their nests.”
“But I’m awake,” niece #1 said, which was undeniably true. Contemplation of the universality of crying babies and getting up to go to work or school helped me maybe, giving me a motherly love for the rest of the world. I had never been a particularly motherly person before. Certainly, I had assumed that I would marry and have children, and I liked children, but I never knew that in becoming Theo’s mother I would become the world’s mother as well.
Theo’s first night at home, after nine days in the children’s hospital, felt tremendous. We’d had lots of instructions and there was medicine to be given. I felt so shaky that I begged my sister-in-law to spend the night with us “just in case” I needed help.
My husband must have been nervous, too. When Theo began a series of hiccupping, my husband insisted that I call the nurse. “It’s just hiccups,” I said. “It’s not a fatal condition.” And I suggested that he make the call since he was the one with the question. He kept insisting, however, so I made the first of what would be many calls to the pediatric nurses’ number. The nurse listened patiently and assured me that hiccupping was not a problem.
That night I put Theo into his bassinet, right next to my side of the bed. I kept looking at him, studying him. He started making little sounds and moving restlessly inside his swaddling blankets. I took him into bed with me (“Wise woman,” a nurse said when I told her about it on the phone the next day), and we both fell blissfully asleep. When I was woken by the baby’s hungry cries, I gathered him up competently (!) and went into the next room, where my poor sister-in-law staggered toward me blinking the sleep out of her eyes, her hands out and ready to help. “It’s okay,” I smiled.
Anyone who’s a mother or feels like everyone’s mother has to suffer and hope for our small planet and all the people on it. But I feel impatient, like a mom standing with hands on hips, saying to her kids: Can’t we all just get along?