My Baby, My Passion

I'm participating in Mama's Losin It's Writers Workshop this week. The subject is, "Describe what makes you want to live a life with passion?":
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When I found out I was pregnant, I did not experience the excitement and awe I’d always dreamed I would experience. I’d always wanted to be a mother, but at the time I was a miserable, unemployed student and living in my parents’ basement, which was placing a huge strain my marriage. It was just about the worst timing ever for the news. I took a couple of weeks to be depressed, wallow and will “it” away. Then I realized, this baby is coming and it doesn’t deserve such a mess for a mother. I had to get it together.

I got a crappy retail job, and on my days off I worked in the church nursery for a little extra cash. I wanted to work in my field, which was community services related, but in order to finish my degree I had to put 600 hours of field work—for free. So my days were dedicated to volunteering, and my nights were spent folding clothes and pretending to be nice to customers, while on weekends I chased around other peoples’ kids, hoping my own would be better behaved, and crammed for exams. In the meantime, my husband and I found free counselling from both an agency and the pastor who married us. We wanted to get as much help for our marriage as possible before it was transformed into a family. We didn’t want our baby caught in the cross-fire. He hadn’t asked for us to be his parents.

The nine months of pregnancy were a frenzy of 12 hour days, penny-pinching the likes of which you have never seen, and valiant attempts to reverse the damage that being poor and living with my family had inflicted on our relationship. During my lunch breaks I holed up in the storage closet with my previously-owned, pay-as-you-go cell phone and made frantic phone calls to different housing agencies, trying to find a place of our own. My parents were having their own relationship issues (read: yelling and screaming) and I was sick to my stomach at the thought of bringing a tiny, helpless baby into that environment. I trolled second-hand shops, craigslist and garage sales looking for the things my little one would need but I couldn’t afford.

Desperate love calls for desperate measures. I didn’t know it then, but this frenetic despair was actually passion in disguise. I was disheartened and hysterical, but devotion to my kid pushed me on and forced me to keep trying. I had to make money, I had to finish school, I just had to find a peaceful quiet place where we could be parents. And I did.

Sitting in the hospital in late July, I realized what it had all been for. I knew that all women didn’t necessarily bond with their babies at birth, but after everything I had been through during the course of my pregnancy, I was desperate to just feel something other than worry or sadness. My husband was an amazing birth coach, and after just under four hours of labour, the nine months of hell I’d endured were a blip on the radar compared with the tornado of love that ripped through me. They threw that baby on me and told me we had a boy, and I knew that I was incapable of living a life that resembled anything ordinary from that moment on.

I live to teach him that anything is possible--to show him the world and how to fully embrace it. I will tell him the story of his nine months in waiting so that he can see how love changes everything. I will live with passion so that he has a good example in me; so that he will do the same.

From the outside, my life is nothing spectacular. But from where we were just a year ago, when I got my Big Freaking Positive, it is absolutely charmed. I dance around covered in spit-up, and do it with gusto. We go for walks with him wrapped around my torso, and I am happy to stop so he can marvel at the leaves. I wake up at 3 am in our new apartment and can’t help but burst with joy as the most beautiful boy in the world grins up at me. It is just a 3 a.m. feeding, but it doesn’t get any better than this.