Seeing yourself

A blogger I follow wrote this: "Not everyone should have children, but I'd venture to guess that you don't really know yourself until you have them. However you come by them, naturally, adopted, foster, surrogate or otherwise, they will show you the best and the worst parts of yourself."

This is the hard parenting truth that makes life so difficult much of the time. The part where you become familiar with your own limits of patience, exhaustion, and selflessness. Those days you wish you weren't anyone's parent at all and could go back to living your life just for yourself again. Just one, tiny day of solitary living. When you are filled with self-hatred for the monster you've released from your most hidden underbelly.

But then, my blogger reminds me, there are the good days too. The days I see myself at my finest. When I am the personification of empathy. When my words are slower and more deliberate, and I can see a glimpse of deep recognition in my daughters' eyes. When I take the time, and I enjoy it.When I am Mommy with a capital M and I can feel the joy of that realization creep through my veins.

Those latter days, unfortunately, are fewer in number than the days when I am not too proud of myself. But they do exist. And the fact remains that nothing is more of a mirror into our own souls than our children, than the very personal path we take as we accompany them through their lives. How we react, the words we say, how we (really) feel about it all...it all becomes crystal clear the second they hand that baby over to you. And the rest of the world, well, doesn't quite melt away but refocuses. And what we're left with at the focal point, left to battle with and re-align, is our own most authentic, individual human nature.