A Surprise Mother

The new parents arrived promptly at 6pm on a Tuesday, their baby bundled up comfortably in a car seat carried by his dad. The end of daylight saving time in the U.S. meant it looked like midnight outside, even though smells and chatter of dinner time were still in the air. The same couple were still expectant parents when we first gifted our son’s newborn bassinet to them. Now eight months later, they came back for the high chair that our now toddler had outgrown, this time with a four-month-old infant in tow. Curiously enough, the sturdy and versatile high chair was originally gifted to our boy from his aunt J, exactly when he was also four months old.

“Hi, cutie pie! Look at those chunky cheeks and little toesies! Your eyes are wide open. Are you giving your parents sleep troubles?” I immediately switched to my sing-song baby voice, and was glad to receive a sweet open-mouthed smile in return.

Our local Buy Nothing group often facilitates these exchanges among neighbors, and it’s not unusual for frequent gifters and recipients to meet more than once. It’s a particularly great platform for new parents to share postpartum supplies, childcare must-knows, and mutual empathy. “Yup, four-month sleep regression is a thing. But honestly, I don’t remember anymore…”

“How old is your son?”

“He’s two and a half now, and we still struggle with sleep,” my husband and I both uttered, thinking back to the recent rounds of daycare germs that exacerbated his months-long bedtime battles. “But with an infant, you guys must be so sleep deprived.” I thought further back to two and a half years ago; those newly-postpartum days were hazy and unforgiving.

“But look what a sweetie pie he is!” Coming back to the present, I exclaimed one more time.

Something switched in me after becoming a mother, first to my daughter, and then even more profoundly to my son two years later.

For as long as I could remember, I had been on the fence about motherhood. In my twenties, navigating the American corporate world as a foreigner, investing in myself professionally, and pursuing meaning and purpose (and romance), all seemed to occupy the day-to-day mental bandwidth of a malleable, ever-changing self. Even though my Chinese mother not so subtly nudged me towards marriage and motherhood every chance she got, I resisted her “suggestions” at every turn and faulted her for not understanding the situation a young foreigner was in on the other side of the planet (and in the Neverland for adults that is San Francisco no less).

Granted, my ambivalence towards young children had always been juxtaposed with my mother’s intense adoration for them. Years ago, while burning Chinese New Year incense at a crowded Buddhist temple back home in Chengdu, Mom gushed over a little girl’s charming holiday outfit and insisted on taking a photo with her, a stranger. During adulthood, I’d only vaguely heard about my mother’s pregnancy losses. (She never directly told me anything.) But all my life, her desire to have more living children had been abundantly clear, even though it wouldn’t have been legal under the almost-four-decades-long One Child Policy. Mom is now beyond her childbearing years, and even as I grew older and endured my own pregnancy loss, the myriad grief and helplessness she must have swallowed is still beyond what I can imagine. Her tireless love for a child, any child, might be her way to cope with her profound losses. Her endless nudges for me to have a child were simply her way to protect me from a similar fate.

The same applied to friends who had kids before me. A friend once wholeheartedly expressed, “When my daughter was born, I realized how raw my love for her was, and different from anything or anyone I’d ever loved before.” Curious but only able to comprehend his words intellectually, I responded almost brazenly, “I think my issue is, I haven’t even invested 100% in myself yet, so I'm not sure if I could invest so fully in a child.” Having worked towards his PhD while his daughter was born, he nodded slightly but didn’t comment further. Looking back, we were simply sitting on the opposite sides of the same table, and both of our positions were valid.

My response was appropriate during a shifting, childless time when I was so sure about applying to graduate school to pursue a life’s work in psychotherapy. Then during the brief time in graduate school, while fulfilled by most coursework, I found myself confused and offended by the anti-feminist sentiment of certain psychological theories (e.g., classical psychoanalytic theory that emphasizes the central but problematic role of mothers in early childhood, and equates womanhood to motherhood alone). Donald Winnicott’s primary maternal preoccupation, although descriptive and temporary, reads as if an infant’s lifelong psychological health depends on a total exclusion of a woman’s interest and pursuits outside her maternal role. In one particular course on psychology of relationships, the lecturer - a staunch psychoanalyst and mother herself - frequently proclaimed her dogmatic admiration for Sigmund Freud. In turn, she subtly shut down many critical voices from students, leaving us intellectually stranded.

The frustration was theoretical for a non-mother then, even though my husband and I had started to talk about having children around that time. Well, especially because we had started to talk about having children. Wouldn’t it be ironic that I become a mother while pursuing my life’s work, but that work itself claims that I’d do my child a lot of harm by pursuing it?

My daughter came and went within three short months, and left me with a lifetime of grief and reflection, along with the “mama bear” instinct and an intense and unfamiliar love for someone I’d never met. Weeks after she died, the lyrics of a baby loss song titled Winter Bear brought me back to my friend’s words years before:

“I never knew a love like this could ever possibly exist.”

With no child to hold, I got a glimpse of what it was like to be a mother and to embody motherly love. It was like peeking into an entirely different universe governed by a distinct set of fundamental physical laws. Maybe it was biological instincts disguised as spiritual awakening, or an attempt to grasp the vastly unique and excruciating pain of ending a wanted pregnancy for medical reasons. Logic mattered little. In the previous universe where I defaulted to intellectualizing motherhood, I truly couldn’t have known that a love like this could ever possibly exist.

After my son was born a healthy baby two years later, the magical and relentless marathon of mothering a living child began. Unlike my nurturing husband who immediately seemed much more at ease around a newborn, I’d never held or taken care of a baby before. (In fact, I’d always been more often smitten with cute pets than little kids.) Even though my daughter gifted me a glimpse of what motherly love was like, caregiving itself demanded concrete skills and stamina that I had never built.

Months of book learning and video courses about breastfeeding and infant care went over my head the minute my newborn greeted the world, screaming and shaking. When he was placed on my chest for skin-to-skin contact, I looked at him in disbelief, unable to fathom that this was the little baby that I’d been carrying for nine months. I should have known him well, no? The songs I’d been humming to him for months should have registered immediately, no? I whispered those tunes in his ears, but nothing happened. I mustered up all my maternal spirit and kissed his forehead, but all he did was breathing rapidly in his sleep, and all I felt was confusion and incapacity. A while later, my husband whisked the newborn away and deftly wrapped him in his first diaper, with a level of competence that I couldn’t master until months later. After thousands of diaper changes and countless “What do I do with him/this?!”, I distinctly remember a moment when I suddenly realized, with a heavy sigh, that childcare is a marathon. The only way you run a marathon is to put one foot in front of the other. In this endurance race called parenthood, strength and resilience are non-negotiable, and therefore, inevitable.

Needless to say, it took me a long while to first shed my discomfort around my own son, and then reach a “real” mother’s level of actually enjoying the company of little kids in general. Even though that enjoyment has been complex and dynamic still, both joy and frustration are now lived experience, no longer theoretical.

Like a pendulum swinging from one side to the other, my formerly awkward self has now transformed into a seemingly natural-born “baby person.” On the playground, at the community center, and in the library, most encounters with little babies turn my speech into high-pitch parentese. Every child is a sweetie pie in my book, worthy of endless hugs and kisses. I feel like a pro mother figure, lock eyes with these little humans, and connect actively, even though exhausted day in day out. If my husband were present, his interactive and approachable nature would amplify my energy level. Both of us know just how much it takes to bring each precious living child into this world and to care for them.

Attention tends to draw more kids closer, and a party ensues. The maternal rhythms now become second nature. While my son keeps playing nearby and keeps growing up, my maternal muscle keeps getting stronger.

“Aw, baby fever.” The mother graciously held my enthusiasm towards her infant son after we gifted him the high chair. Stunned by her remark for a split second and then amused, I giggled, “Oh, this is new to me too…”

After we parted ways with the new family, I joked with my husband, “Gosh, I’m a mother. What a surprise!”

Kids are mirrors, and we grow as they grow.