My first mother's day

So it's Mother's Day, a Hallmark holiday so overblown that even Nascar won't race; they'd love to figure out how to have a special event with the drivers racing with their moms, if only they could figure out how to make sure nobody would wreck, or that everybody would, depending. It'd be a gold mine.

Anyway, last night our family did the only thing it does efficiently--celebrate six birthdays at once--and for a moment my two-weeks-from-10-years- old daughter looked so grown-up it nearly took my breath away. Made me think of the first time she took my breath away, quite literally.

Turns out that months of What to Expect When You're Expecting and endless if eventually pointless wrangling over maternity leave and baby showers and baby names and dumpy clothes and midwife appointments and cravings for bologna and frito sandwiches and bloodtests and Babies R Us and assembling the cutest nursery ever to be used for only 6 weeks and hauling home bags of baby clothes and baby bathtubs from a coworker and ultrasound pictures and buying breastpumps and lamaze classes and bedrest and, oh, PREGNANCY, and 23 hours of unmedicated labor and 6 hours in the hospital and 28 minutes of pushing is not necessarily enough to make one completely understand that at the end of the process the nice nurse-midwife is going to wake up from her nap and hand over a baby. OH! one may well think, if one is as slow on the uptake as I. A BABY. Did I mention that I did not have any drugs?

Sober as anything, at the entirely civilized hour of 6:58 p.m. (though I don't remember sleeping much the night before), I was, in fact, a little taken aback at that theoretical baby who was suddenly squirming in my arms, more real than anything ever was before.

I doubt I could find a Hallmark card that captures my first motherly feelings, but it's worth more to me than anything stamped on a piece of overpriced cardboard could be. It was awesome in the true sense of the word. Kind of like that little glance tonight.