Here's my girl. We went on a trail ride near Harper's Ferry and it was really pleasant. I feel so fortunate to enjoy this age with her as she comes into her own.
But back to me. Doesn't it always circle that way eventually? I'm amazed at how transformative it's been to be a mother. I'm not who I was then, and I can't imagine who I'd be without her. I'm surely better.
I remember when I was in labor with Emer. I paced the hallways on the maternity ward and came to look out a window that looked out over the highway. The same highway that everyone in the area has to drive on to get past Portsmouth NH. I had this weird sense of vertigo where I felt like I could see/feel that other me, the before motherhood me, driving by on the road below me. And I could never drive past there afterward without feeling that a part of me was still there, looking down. As if part of me split off to live in that limbo, and is still there now. Maybe I just tapped into the universal nature of it all. My face out the window has been a thousand other faces, enjoying the same view as other women have undergone the same transformation. I don't know if there's any thing else in life so that shapes you so completely as parenthood.
She is the first knife, carving me into who I need to be.
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