Jul 28 2008
Monday Musings - Mommyhood
I’ve always wondered why no one really tells you what to expect when you enter motherhood. All you ever hear is those usual things “life will never be the same” “you’ll never sleep again” “you’ll spend the rest of your life worrying”, etc. But they never really cover the in depth range of emotion you experience as a mother.
I never thought I would find a day that I would worry about the most innocuous of things. I never thought it was possible to love my child more than the day before. There are times I look at her and I swear my heart feels like it’s going to explode. Those times are usually when she doesn’t even realize I’m looking at her. There are times that she just blows me away. Of course, I say these things like I’m the only mother in the world that has had these feelings towards their children!
I love that she still lets me hug and kiss on her and she’s not embarrassed yet. She was playing independently earlier and I asked her to please come here. She walks up and I give her a huge hug and tell her that my love meter was low and I needed a recharge. I was charging charging charging my love meter! She laughed so hard and then says “But wait mommy!!! You can’t charge too much… because if you do, I won’t have any love left for Daddy!” Isn’t that the sweetest??? So we agreed to make sure and save enough love for Daddy to recharge his love meter too. (insert that heart feeling like it’s going to explode sensation again).
I will openly admit though, that yesterday she really BLEW ME AWAY. We’ve known for a while now that she pretty much falls into the “freaky smart” category. Maybe we should have noticed when she started her fascination with books as soon as she could sit up. (yeah! I have an excuse to put one of my favorite pictures here as a reference!)
But I still have moments when I guess I live in denial and she brings that reality rushing right back to me. Last night, I’m cozied up on the couch watching her play “Big Brain Academy” on the Wii. She can’t be happy with an easy level, which we repeatedly *tried* to get her to do. She has this really bad habit of wanting to push herself beyond her ability, but then getting frustrated when she can’t figure it out…. so we try to cut it off at the pass. I learned an amazing lesson last night while trying to cut her off at the pass. I really don’t give her enough credit :( Okay… so where was I??? Oh yeah, so she’s playing big brain academy and insists on playing the hard level. I sit on the couch, preparing for the onslaught of outrage when her frustration kicks in, from not knowing the answers. I sat and watched. I watched her whiz through these games, one after the other. My jaw started to hang lower and lower. I watched her identify a screen full of balloons in which she had to select the lowest to the highest number and pop them in that order. I looked at that screen and saw numbers like -97, -44, 62, 4, 59, 23, 25, -17, etc. *I* was having a hard time visually identifying them with the time ticker counting down as added pressure. She FLEW through them, not missing a single one. She moved onto the memory games where she nailed every single one of them. She moved onto the math games, which.. understandably, she missed several, but she GOT some of them! I’m not talking easy addition, I’m talking about adding double digit numbers, multiples of times, in a 10 second span. I was shocked.
I learned last night, that I need to stop thinking of her in terms of what is “normal” for her age, and start giving her the credit that she deserves. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for a child, for them to KNOW they can do something, but repeatedly be told by adults that “they can’t do that, they aren’t old enough”. Like her various science experiments LOL!
She’s going in…..
I hope this doesn’t cause any permanent brain damage….
You see, that is the other thing no one ever told me about being a mother…. that my little girl would teach me so much every day. I’m in awe of how much I learn from her every day. What I would give to look at the world through her eyes.
Not to sound like a ridiculous sap….. but I am so blessed to have been chosen in this world as her mother. My only hope in this world is that I’m capable of teaching her as much as she’s already taught me in her 4 years on this earth.