Heirloomed

My experience taught me. It was a mind-lost moment like so many before children, and so many with them. I was shaken alert, shaken into perfect understood awareness that I am their parent. The one they get their world view from, the one who scripts out their reality. I am her mother. Mother. Like the one I had and didn't have. The one my mother was sure to have wished to be more often. I am lucid and sober. I am young and inexperienced.
Everything done and gone is illuminated. The frustration of immaturity in this role, the sighs and escapes. Parenthood, after all, is the most taxing and requires temperance and I see how much I don't have measuring inadequately against what is required. As my dad said, "You didn't come with a book of instructions."
I love being a mother. I feel like after 3 + years of these exercises in selflessness and service, sanity and insanity, I am beginning to blossom and grow. I love the holding. I want more holding. I want more projects and quiet times. I want more us and less me. I want soothing selflessness rather than quick occupation for relief that never seems to quench.