I Know You...I Love You!

A month and a third has passed, and I am looking at this stout and somehow unfamiliar creature who is flashing his toothless gums at me in a smile.

I say the creature's name and try to smile back. My smile feels fake, somehow. But the creature opens his mouth to reveal even more gums and a throaty chuckle. I am highly astonished and deeply moved.

Eli. Who are you? I've been nursing you, changing your poopy diapers and giving you baths. For you I undergo chronic sleep deprivation and unending back pain. I rock your bassinet and sing you to sleep. And all of it just seems so automatic. Like something that needs to be done because its there. And because frankly, I've no choice in the matter.

Thinking about that now...God, that sounds awful! You're my son for juan's sake. And it seems I've just discovered you. Might it have been the lack of sleep? Perhaps the move to the new apartment shifted my neurons a bit. Or was it Manong Woog's deviant episodes that shoved your existence to the far reaches of my awareness?

I merely have to look at you and you present me with one of your pure unadulterated smiles. All my doubts about your ability to see clearly dissipate then and there. You never smile at your yaya like that. Not even for Tatay. After all these weeks of caring for you like an automaton, I must've done something right.

And oh, thank God you're too young to know the difference between true mindful mothering and the distracted zombie-like upkeep that you've had to put up from me.

But I promise you, son of mine, you whose grinning expanse of gums is surpassed only by your obvious rapture at the sight of your lackadaisical mother...I promise you a more attentive and attuned parent, a limitlessly patient and tangibly loving parent. Despite the exhaustion. Despite the lack of sleep. I promise you all my good intentions, no matter how tremendously outlandish they may seem.

And perhaps, when you are old enough to read, and you happen upon this obscure entry from this equally obscure blog under your mother's name, then perhaps you just might find it within yourself to forgive her lapses, past and present.

Because she means well, she really does.

Septemer 2006