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Alex I went to a baby shower yesterday. It is her first child and she’s worried that this child will take over her life. “I don’t want motherhood to define me,” she said. “I want to be me first. Not just a mother.” Her friends murmured around her and I smiled a smile inside me as I helped myself to another strawberry. The juice was tart and sweet at the same time and a tiny bit dribbled down my chin. I caught it with my finger and watched it glow at the tip of my finger. Blood red and sparkling. Perfectly caught in that moment. The sunlight through the windows caught the tiny drop on the end of my finger and made it blaze with depth and color. Motherhood is the greatest pain and the greatest transformation there is. It is a force more powerful than anything in the world. Mariama Ba says in her book “So Long a Letter,” “To become a mother is to love without beginning and without end.” It is the mystery of life that we carry within our bodies. I thought of when I was pregnant and how happy I was. That was the first time I remember feeling like I was wholly fulfilling what I was supposed to. I always feel slightly awkward, slightly out of place, slightly over or underdressed. And I’m always self-conscious. I think it comes from never feeling at home anywhere. I always chase around from one place to the next thinking that I’ll find somewhere I belong, but I never did. Never have. When I was pregnant I felt whole. I could retreat into myself and know that my body was fulfilling what it was made for. Women tell how they hate that they lose control of their bodies when they’re pregnant but I always felt full of wonder at the things my body could do. The outside world didn’t matter anymore. There was another person so intimately knit into me that she was actually part of me. I could touch her hand inside my body as pushed against me. Inside me. It’s one of those things that I can’t find words to describe. When she left my body I cried, not only from the pain, but from the feeling of emptiness. I guess you can never hold anyone inside you; it’s always a choice for him or her. Except when they are growing inside you. But after, then there’s always a choice isn’t there? When I first felt her trying to push out the pain took my breath away. I wanted to live every moment of it. Just when you feel like you can’t stand the pain anymore it goes to a place where it is so painful that its not even pain. It’s just you and your baby in this place, in this amazing moment of agonizing separation, of beautiful birth. When she was born the doctor delivered her head and shoulders and then I reached down and pulled her out of me so that the first hands she felt on her body were mine and I laid her right on my heart. I can’t remember who did what; I don’t know who cut her cord or who cleaned out her ears or nose. I just remember holding her on my chest and feeling our heartbeats and our blood that had been intertwined for so long slowly separate and start on independent journeys. But I will always remember the time I could touch her hand inside me. I licked the little drop of strawberry from my finger. As mothers we are broken and bitten. We love with a stubborn rage. But we’re like that strawberry that is perfect in its brokenness. That reveals depths of color and brilliance that it cannot if it is not cut into. We bleed love. It is the sisterhood that unites us. “Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate.” – Charlotte Gray Lorena Smith was born and raised in Sri Lanka where her Swedish mother and Sinhalese father run an orphanage and various social empowerment programs. She has been published in several magazines and e-zines like ascent, Sketching Stone, Humdinger, The Smoking Poet, Door Knobs and Body Paint. She has short stories appearing in two anthologies due out in May 2007, and Elephant in the Playground and Special Gifts. She is also being published in Rambler Magazine in their spring issue. She writes mostly on life and family, issues surrounding parenting special needs kids and women’s issues in developing countries. Lorena lives in Flower Mound, Texas with her husband and children Alexandra, 9, and JJ, who is autistic, 8.
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