Mother's Day

It was Mother's Day here in the US on Sunday, so I was thinking about, well, being a mother. I know. Pretty original, huh?

I have a confession to make. I cyber-stalk people about to have babies. I do. Not many - just one or two, here and there. If I come across a blogger about to drop, I add them to my reader, and await the birth. I love the excitement. Ooh, there's a post! Has she had that baby yet?... No, just another post about being fed up with waiting, and a trip to the hospital for monitoring... Ooh, another one! This time?... (Hello, Stockholm.)

I used to love waiting for friends' babies, but now I'm of an age and stage where there aren't too many of those in my immediate life. So I have to get my fix of enjoying babies arriving via the internet (the fix arriving via the internet, that is, not the baby - though in this galloping century, who knows? maybe that will be the next thing).

I love those first exuberant announcements. I love seeing the photo, and the details, and the boasting comments of the parent. We become all childish in our excitement, don't we, when we see them? It's a bit ridiculous, honestly. I mean, take the photo. Let's be honest, that photo of your beautiful newborn... it looks like, well, a baby, doesn't it? Not very different to all those other photos of newborns. Maybe less or more hair, maybe sleeping or awake, maybe scrunched up or not quite so scrunched up. But there's not a whole lot to remark upon, is there?

Then we read the details. Weight, length, and um... there's not much else to say about a baby at this stage. Usually these days there's not even a surprise regarding the gender. Weight - well, there's not a huge variation, honestly, is there? Length - no-one ever even bothered to measure my babies so we couldn't tell people their length, but I didn't feel it was a huge loss. (Isn't it interesting, incidentally, that we talk about length, rather than height? I suppose you have to be able to stand up to have a height.)

So it can't really be the photo and the information. No. I'll tell you what it is. It's the pride of the parents. The bursting, unembarrassed, overwhelming pride that they can hardly contain, in this little scrap of humanity. When we sent out an email announcing the arrival of our third, a friend emailed back "May you always be as proud of her as you are today".

I have often thought of that comment. With a newborn, it's pride at its purest. You're not proud because your child has learnt all his spellings, or because she's got into the netball team, or because he's been nice to his brother and shared his lego, or because she's on the podium at graduation, or because she looks unbearably sweet with her first pony tail, or because he's managed a poo in the potty. You're not proud because anything. You're just proud that the baby is who he or she is - which actually, you know almost nothing about at that point. In fact, all you know about this creature is that it has caused you 9 months' worth of pregnancy complaints, then a few hours of exquisite pain, and that it has the ability to yell, blink a lot, and fill a nappy. It's not a great list of endearments.

Pure unprocessed pride. When you are wanting to throw open the door of the maternity wing, and say to the assembled company "Look, look, LOOK at my baby!... MY baby!..." surely that is parenthood at its finest. Unconditional, all-accepting, unquestioning pride. Dare I say it reflects the divine? Yes, I think I dare.

Of course some people don't feel the parent pride thing straightaway. It may take hours or days to feel much for that scrap of their own, that everyone else seemed so excited about. And that's fine too.

I wonder if animals feel it. I saw a duck with a brood of 10 ducklings in the park the other day. She kept a watchful eye on me as I stopped to watch them, but I didn't think she was very afraid. I wondered if she was actually enjoying showing off her brood (and yes, I did talk to her, out loud, congratulating her on her fine off-spring and saying what a good job she'd done with the eggs, and that's why I like being anonymous in my blog, so that I can confess to weird behaviour like that).

Mother's Day. Well, I wasn't at my best on Mother's Day. I shouted at my kids, and I'm never proud of that. So I'm preaching to myself here. "May you always be as proud of her as you are today." Of course it gets a bit more complicated as life trots on. It is part of the job of a parent to teach good behaviour, good attitudes, spelling, so it becomes appropriate to be proud of your children's achievements and efforts (though can't we just drop the spelling, now they've invented Spellcheck?). But it's good to remember, as much as we can, the more important pride that undergirds it all: pride in them just because they are. And now I sense I'm beginning to ramble, so I'm going to go to the park and see if I can find a few more mother ducks and geese to talk to.

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