Exponential [Secret] [Love]

This morning as I sat with the Cricket nursing on my lap-- both he and I still prefer the football hold-- I was thinking about how big he's gotten, easily twice the size of when he was born. And then I thought of how I loved him.

I'm going to confess something I'm hesitant to reveal, which means it's really true and "close to the bone." (I used to teach my own writing students to write 'close to the bone'-- it's honest and scary and wonderful all at the same time... See how I'm hedging my confession here?)

When the Cricket was born, I don't know if I loved him immediately. Oh, and see I don't know that love is even the correct word here because of course I loved him, even when he was in the womb. I can remember one day when I was pregnant and Partner and I were driving the Very Busy Road in our city and I had to swerve and slam on the brakes to avoid a woman who was turning left into us. I pulled over into the first parking lot and just sobbed thinking how if she had hit us, Cricket would have been in serious danger. So, yes, I loved him even then, but it was different.

When I realized that I was going to have the baby five weeks early, I stood in my sopping wet socks and cried. I wasn't ready. Yet. I was hoping to have those five more weeks to think about his impending arrival, decorate the nursery, mediate with my hands on my enormous stomach and try to get closer to the new life. Instead I sat on a towel in my Partner's truck hurtling down the expressway to the hospital three days after Christmas and tried to calm myself down. Just because things didn't start the way I wanted, it didn't mean, I thought, I couldn't have the birth I wanted. And as calm as my demeanor in the hospital was, I was scared. Scared to have the birth I wanted, more scared to have the birth I didn't want, and petrified of the new life inside of me that I would soon be responsible for in an ever-so tangible way.

Not once when we finally got the hospital did I cry, scream, or otherwise. Toward the end of the first pitocin drip when I had no epidural, I probably mooed. But to no one, not even my Partner did I admit how scared I was. Then when I was wheeled into the OR, I told them I was freezing and so they put a warming blanket over the top half of my body, but nothing could stop me from shaking. Why? Because I was not so much cold as scared shitless.

And when they showed me the Cricket, I stretched out my fingers to touch him, but no one could see since they were strapped down under the warming blanket. When they took him to the NICU, it only made me more scared. When the wheeled me into the NICU, I can remember looking at him lying on his stomach, tubes and wires attached to him. I wanted to pick him up and hold him as much as I wanted to close my eyes and not see any of it. And so while I loved him, I was more scared of him and his fragility and my responsibility for such in the first few weeks of his life. Love underlined all the fear.

Now he really is growing into a sturdy boy, just as I wanted him too. I'm not so scared, however that's not to say there isn't any fear. Tears can appear instantly if I think of something happening to him, but that's just normal mommy fear. So what's happened is that the love is growing, exponentially. As my confidence as a mother grows, so does my love for the kid. I feel totally different about him now than I did when he was first born. Instead of love underlining the fear, love is the dominant emotion now. Fear is a footnote; always present in some ways, but regulated to the end of the text. It's important enough to be present, but not so central to the text of my motherhood.

With exponential growth, the larger something gets, the faster it grows. Being one of the few geeks that actually enjoyed differential equations when I took calculus, I was thrilled when we did problems that demonstrated exponential growth. Then this past year in Microbiology, I was captivated by bacterial and their log growth in optimum conditions. Hey, I'm a dork, and you should now that by now if you read my blog. But as I studied different ways things grow, exponential growth seemed to be concept limited to things like growing interest in bank accounts and specimens of S. aureus. Probably there was some sort of learning exponential growth curve too, but I never thought of love following such a graph. Which is silly because now that I think of it, most love in my life has followed such a pattern, such that real love begets more and more love. My brothers, my parents, my partner, and now my child have all proven that such a mathematical model holds true. It would be difficult to prove in the mathematical sense, in that I have no values to place on where we started and where we're going, but if you can know in your heart a math concept is true, I know it keenly and joyfully.

I'm quite sure that I'm not the only woman who felt this way when her child was born, but isn't it taboo to talk about? What we hear is "I fell in love the minute I saw him/her" which is, as I said, true, but that love might be fraught at the start. I had to tell the truth because where I've come from that time to now is unbelievable, and reaching such new heights deserves to be chronicled. To be close to the bone. And all that love for such a wee man.