A Mother's First Thought

There is something about an infant’s smile. That very first one, where the edges of their mouth can’t quite make the right shape. You know they are trying though; you can tell by the slight curve of their lips, and it is precious. You wonder why people over use “my pride and joy” when referring to their child, that is until you have children of your own. At that moment, you wonder how anyone could mistreat their own child. But you don’t wonder that in the way you did as a child, oh no. You wonder that as you do now, looking into the eyes of a little being that is half of you, and half of someone else.

Maybe that someone else is the love of your life. That love you know will last a life time, or you had hoped it would. Maybe that someone else is a one-night stand, or even worse. Non the less, there is now a little person that depends on you. This person doesn’t know or even care how they came into the world. All they know is you are their world. It is in that instant that everything changes. You hope it’s for the better, even though you don’t know what that something better is. You will though, I promise.

It always gets better. As a child, my mother said to me “sometimes it has to get worse before it can get better.” I have to remind myself of that every day. It will get better, and you need to make sure you are still around to see it. If your significant other just broke up with you and you think your world just came to a screeching halt, it will get better. Someday, you could be married and stay up late listening to your significant other reading a bedtime story to your kids in the other room. Now, I know what you’re thinking. It could also get worse. That someone could wake up one day and decide they don’t want to stay, and it gets worse again. But always, it will get better.

The Moulin Rouge! taught me “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.” Love is a very strange concept. You may love someone, and they don’t know you even exist. You may be in love with someone for the first time, and later in your life you realize that wasn’t love. You think, “I can never love someone more than I love this person”, or “I can never love this person more than I do now”. However, you might be wrong. You might be wrong about everything. There’s that little person you know, the one from the first sentence of this page? The one that was or was not planned, yet is here now.

Everything has changed. Your world is so different now that they exist. You’re afraid that everything would go wrong in the blink of an eye, and you’d have no control. You can’t control the actions of other people. The Nightly News isn’t just something your parents used to watch and frown at. Now it’s you. You are the one looking at that screen and thinking “what is this world coming to?”

You start to realize the little things, and how those little things might be the big things. How words that to you mean so many things, really only have one meaning. You better watch your words, because someone is listening. Your temper better be under control, because someone is watching. Someone is growing up learning all the important things in life by watching you. That is when you realize that maybe you could still learn a thing or two, and maybe you have a lot of growing up to do too.