January's surprises

Januaries have often held deep surprises for me. For example, the one 34 years ago when I had just begun my first maternity leave from teaching comes to mind. I remember eating tangerine after tangerine—I think I ate a dozen in one day—and watching early Saturday Night Live shows as I waited for my life to change irrevocably and completely with the birth of our first child. My husband and I went to the hospital on January 26, only to be sent home because the labor wasn't "productive." For two days, I measured the space between contractions and reviewed my readiness for great change as Janus must have done as he looked both back and forward. We returned to the hospital on January 28, and Matt was born shortly after midnight on January 29. Now he and his wife have three daughters who are 6, 4, and 2.

The surprise I am thinking of wasn't that babies change everything. The surprise is the depth of those changes and the intertwined threads that tangle and weave and web themselves into a heart. Who would I be if I had not been a mother first?