A mother’s reflections
I am here late at night with nothing to say except that I have a beautiful daughter who I love so much and if anyone tried to take her away I think I would do terrible things to them.
That sounds morbid. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. It’s just that from the moment you find out you are pregnant, and decide you want this child more than anything, you spend months sick, bloated, but completly connected to this being inside you and it’s just yours…yours…yours… until that special day when she comes out of you and you meet her for the first time….those gorgeous little blue eyes peering up at you…. and the world spins around and suddenly you are a completly different person…mother.
And then suddenly all these people walk in and congratulate you and name themselves grandma, grandpa, uncles, aunts…. father. Well father was there the whole time telling me i was doing labour all wrong… anyways… then suddenly they all want to hold her and kiss her, and she’s crying and you want her back in your arms…
Then they talk about their rights to her and suddenly you are left supporting her on your own because daddy pays when he feels like it and barely sees her. When he does find the time to spend time with her he can barely handle her spitting up or her crying, and gets flustered. Oh but he wants 50% custody. Not even to spend with her but to dump off at his strange and forboding, dry, dull, and cold parents…just to get out of paying child support. Well fuck his support, I would sooner he signed off his rights to her than take her just to get out of a few dimes.
Don’t get me wrong. I think family is very important,. I want sarah to be very involved in family and I never want her to feel like people are fighting over her like some object. Yet…if you MET her grandparents and saw their..coldness. if you MET dale and got to know him…and discovered his emotional imbalance…you would want to wrap your arms around her and keep her as far away from them as possible.
She’s not mine either. She belongs to herself. But for the time that she is with me I want to her to be secure, loved, and know boundaries, so when she comes of age her opportunities are limitless. I want her to never be afraid, alone, or to to be taught certain things I never want her to be taught…and how can I protect her from that? How can I protect her from her own blood family? Certainly they have the right to see her…but the thought still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
It sounds paranoid. I mean and I hardly look credible. I go from married, to cheating, to seperated, to meeting some random guy and falling like crazy for him, to pregnant…to a mother. It all sounds surreal, and i’m the one who sounds like the mess!
I can assure you that I was. I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, and marriage was an escape that turned into a prison, and then everything else spun out of control.
My world stopped spinning when sarah came into it. I know who I am now. I am her mother, her provider, and not afraid to take all these people head on and tell them where to go and how to get there. She is going to grow up intelligent, funny, warm, and compassionate towards others. I will be damned if anyone tries to brainwash her or hurt her.
Being a single mother won’t be easy, When you have two people watching over a child they also balance eachother out. One will be too hard, so the other will soften them up… they make decisions together deciding their child’s welfare. I will have to be hard, and soft, and somewhere in the middle. I know I can do it though.
Anyways…I’m off to carry my sleeping baby to bed. Goodnight… 🙂