Letter to My Firstborn

Dear child of mine,

I have many things on my list of things to do today, all of them in preparation for your arrival. You could decide to make your grand appearance any day now and I still have not packed my hospital bag, or written notes for your father about what I think will help me in labor, or completed preparing your nursery, or cleaned out the freezer to make room for breast milk. But, my child, there is something I hope you will learn quickly in life. Sometimes there are days when you have a lot to do, and those things are valid and they really do need to be done, and still you have to say, “Later. This is what will make me happy and this is valid, too.”

I have been intending to write to you for nearly this entire pregnancy, yet every time I spent some time alone with you to tell you all the things I’ve been thinking, I ended up simply talking to you, just enjoying our time together, and not capturing any of it in words. And that’s probably OK, too. I know you won’t recall these times alone together, but they are some of the most treasured of my life and I’ll remember them enough for the both of us. Though I know that you will soon be here and we will embark on a whole new journey of getting to know each other, and that I will finally be able to see you, and hold you in my arms, and stroke your face, I know that I will miss you for a short while. I have shared every moment of my life and yours with you for nine months now, and though I hope I am never one of those mothers who can’t leave her child with other people for a night out, the thought of the first time I will be in a separate room from you makes me ache for your nearness, to feel the reassuring signs of your life within me, to know again that our lives are completely intertwined, that my breath is your breath, that my food is your food, that the sounds of my life are the sounds of yours. I am excited for this new step you are taking toward independence, eager for you to know your own life separate from mine, to experience this world of ours through your own senses, and to see what you make of it all. I just sometimes wish I could continue to be a part of it all, the way I have been for your life up to this point. Forgive me if I am sometimes overbearing or intrusive: I will try my hardest not to be.

We have spent many hours lying together: you kicking and squirming and punching and rolling all around, while I watch your movements and feel them with my hands, and poke at you when you stop because I don’t want you to go to sleep yet. When you were about six months old we visited your grandparents for a week and while they were at work all day you and I raided their music collection. You liked the blues and we danced together in their den and it was better than any dance I’ve ever had with a man.

Later that week, as I cradled my belly and tried to fall asleep, it occurred to me that you will experience pain: deep, heartwrenching, emotional pain, and there will be times when I am powerless to do anything about it, and that, worse, there will be times when I am the cause of it. I wept for all the things your father and I will do wrong in our relationship with you, for all the times we will cause you heartache, for all the times you will know anything but the joy of life.

I don’t know how I can love you as much as I do, and I don’t know how the human heart and psyche can withstand love of such intensity. I hope for many things for you, and among them is that you will get to know this kind of love. I am beginning to recognize what I have always suspected: that as much as I love my parents, their love for me is of a vastly different kind, one more primal, more visceral, more consuming. I have never fully believed in truly unconditional love, but you, my child, may just make a believer out of me yet.

I am anxious to meet you, little one, and to get to know you, and see you get to know yourself and grow into the person you will become. Very soon I will hold you in my arms instead of in my body and I will do my very best to be as safe and comforting and nurturing as I have been for the past nine months. When I fail, I hope you will learn to forgive me, and when I succeed I hope you will, every now and then, give me a smile that’s just for me.

I love you. With all my being, I love you.
Mom