"I don't like Agnes much," said my mother, "She's definitely no Aunt Gerty.  But it's because Gerty was so wonderful that I think Uncle Fred is marrying Agnes."

"What do you mean?" I asked.  Uncle Fred and Aunt Gerty had been married over fifty years when Gerty died.  I was in my early teens at the time and had always figured that the sign of a truly happy marriage was keeping that space in heart and home forever sacred, and never marrying again once you'd lost that one true love.  So it had seemed strange to me that, after a year or so of seeming lost in grief, Uncle Fred had started dating with so much enthusiasm.  He was over eighty and had a social life more active than mine.

"Well, Uncle Fred and Aunt Gerty loved each other a lot, but he not only misses her, he misses being married. He's had such good times being married, and he's used to living life with a partner. But then look at John, next door; he and Martha had a hard time. It's been years since she passed away, and he doesn't even have the slightest interest in dating.  I'm sure he doesn't want to go through that again."

Our elderly neighbor John seemed to love and care about his wife Martha, but her mental illness colored everything. She was depressed, addicted to prescription medications and could have been (if she had lived in today's reality TV world) featured on Hoarders. When she died, I assumed that John, a great, spunky man with a quick smile and a zest for life, would finally have the chance to find a partner who could make him happy.  But I'd been baffled to find that he preferred to spend his time alone, tending to his garden.  Maybe my mother was right: with no experience of marriage as happy, John had no incentive to get into a new relationship.

I find myself thinking of John from time to time, because (I know, never say never) I can't picture myself ever wanting to get into a romantic relationship again.  I'm happy in my marriage as it is now, but I can't imagine starting this all over again with someone new.  It's too dang much work.  And I have no illusions that the next time, if I somehow pick the "right guy" (you know, not a crazy sex addict), the journey would be an effortless dance on a carpet of rose petals rather than, well, more hard work.  It's similar to the way I love my kids and have found parenting rewarding beyond belief, but I have no desire to adopt more newborns when my children are grown.  (I don't even get nostalgic for that newborn scent and downy hair, because I know all too well it comes with dirty diapers and sleepless nights.)  If I lose Mark before he loses me, I fully plan to spend my golden years, ensconced in a house full of beautifully fragile and child unfriendly things, in happy retirement from both romantic relationships and young children.

But what if things happen the other way around?  I had a cancer scare recently, and while I was waiting for the biopsy results, I wavered between faith and fear.  I was firmly on the faith side for several days, knowing that whatever happened (whether it was, from my perspective, good or bad), I would be where I should be and I would be supported, loved and able to cope.  But thoughts of my own mortality would creep in, especially as time went on, and while I valiantly pushed out thoughts of what my kids would do should the absolute worst case be true (there was no way I was going there), I did find myself wondering which path my husband, still just in his forties, would choose.  And I found myself fighting back tears as I drove to an appointment, because I couldn't imagine Mark being alone and that thought hurt deeply and scared me as much as almost anything else.

Before the disclosure of sex addiction, I used to be comforted by the thought that, if I died, a remarriage would be, like it was for my Uncle Fred, a way of honoring the happiness we have and of finding (hopefully) a new loving partner to be there for the kids.  Besides, as Mark always says, "I don't care what you do after I'm dead.  I'll be dead, so I won't know the difference."  But now I found it brought up, not just echoes of abandonment and betrayal, but illusions of my own power and fears of the addiction surfacing anew in my absence.  I could hear the whisper in my mind, "I have to live, because if I'm gone, there's nothing to keep him from diving right back into insanity."  And that's the sound of me diving back into my insanity.

When my doctor called to tell me that all was well, it was a relief to know that my physical body is sound, but it was also a relief to know I have time to deal with those little demons in my mind that tell me that I'd be better at picking Mark's path than he would and that I'm the only thing standing between my family and disaster.  That kind of pressure is exhausting.  No wonder John's post-Martha puttering in the garden looks so attractive to me!

Eight years ago, in spite of the fact that we were both exhausted by caring for our infant son, I found that my husband Mark was staying up later and later at night. He had to be up at 5 a.m. to get ready for work, yet I would wake some nights at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. to my son, wailing for a feeding or a diaper change, and find Mark's side of the bed empty, cold, untouched. Then I'd glance to the bedroom door and see the eerie blue glow of the computer screen in the next room creeping in. And I knew he was looking at porn. Sometimes I'd ask him to come to bed, sometimes I'd just stew and wait. And in the morning, I'd wonder, "Should I be worried about this? If he is, is it a big deal? Is this ok? Is it normal?"

Those seemed like legitimate questions at the time. He wouldn't stay up every night. And sometimes he was actually doing some work, or starting off doing some work. (Hey, I'm codependent. I spied, so I know.) I knew he was looking at some porn, but I didn't have a problem with porn. It was one of those things guys did, right? And I even viewed it myself. But this seemed like a lot. Did he have a problem? Or was I crazy and overreacting? (I knew he fell on the side of crazy and overreacting. But if he was crazy then his evaluation of the situation couldn't be trusted.) I simply didn't trust myself or my own feelings. I wanted some neutral third party to say where the line should be drawn, to define exactly what was normal, what was ok, what was worrisome, what was a problem.

I was thinking about all this as I read an article about how his porn use is the equivalent of her pedicures, a way to relax and blow off steam. The author of the piece asked questions like "should you be worried?" and tried to reassure partners that, even if porn use bothers them, it may not be a "big deal." They may be overreacting. All of which made me want to punch the author in the nose and then send him to a therapist who could teach him not to invalidate people's feelings. (What? Are you saying I still have control issues? No worries, I'll lovingly detach and let him crash and burn and learn on his own.)

The reason I got fussy when I read that, is because it took me some time in recovery to realize that there is no "should" when it comes to feelings. And that lesson is still raw. It's something that I am apt to forget as I fall back into fretting over whether or not I "should" be upset or angry or worried. I'll wonder who is right and who is wrong and who is crazy and who is sane and what's normal and grind myself to bits hoping that the world will arbitrate in my favor.

But here's the thing: a problem is a problem. If something worries me, it's worrisome to me. If my husband was staying up at night looking at porn, and it was bothering me, it didn't matter if he was an addict or not; it was bothering me! And it was ok for me to be bothered by it even if it wasn't a problem for him. If my feelings about his porn use were interfering with our relationship, then there was a problem with porn use in our relationship. Likewise, if I'm spending money on spa vacations and my husband is getting anxious and irritable about that, if he's feeling threatened because I'm spending time having my pedicurist massage my feet rather than him, then my spa time is an issue in our relationship, even if pedicures are perfectly healthy and relaxing for me and he "shouldn't" be upset. It doesn't matter how he or I "should" feel, it only matters how we do feel.

Thankfully, we've found recovery programs and therapists that have helped us deal with our problems in a way that has acknowledged and respected each of our feelings, rather than telling us that the way to solve the problem was to convince us that we should stop having those feelings.

When my son was first born, I actually spent some time doing that thing that we stay-at-home moms supposedly spend our lazy, bon-bon eating days doing: I watched television. Now, I know, folks who haven't actually been stay-at-home parents to a colicky infant -- whose poor little nervous system hated the bright, loud world outside the womb -- have this image of what it means to stay at home and watch TV all day: comfortably clad in pajamas, with feet up and snacks and cool drinks within easy reach, the idle mom flicks through television channels weighing the merits of Oprah vs. Ellen, a rosy baby sleeping peacefully in a bassinet somewhere. So for those folks, let me set you straight right now. That ain't how it goes. And believe me, I wanted that to be how it goes. Why do you think I signed up for this whole Mama gig in the first place?

Those days I spent watching TV have this blurry, disjointed dream quality in my memory. Were there multiple days? Or was it all one long day? I think it's really all a single day, months long, in which I'm never really awake but also never fully asleep...

I doze for an hour here and there and then gaze out at the world through glazed, foggy eyes for a few hours before nodding off again. I'm some weird, ironically life-giving combination of a vampire and those red eyed soldiers in the movies who've been subjected to some experiment that takes away their need to sleep in order to create the perfect killing machine. The curtains are always drawn whether from migraines or because I'm nursing. The baby only consistently stops his piercing screams when I'm nursing, so I'm almost always nursing. Some days I just don't bother to put on a shirt at all; I walk around in huge, industrial nursing bras leaking milk like a giant cow.

When I put him in the bassinet, he screams like he's on fire. I haven't showered in days. I'm too exhausted to get anything to eat or drink, and besides, if I move, the baby will wake up and scream. It's like sitting with a live grenade on my lap. I haven't slept more than two hours at a stretch in weeks, maybe months. The TV is my constant companion, full of adult human voices that distract me without demanding any mental energy. I long for the day when I can stop watching reruns of Law and Order (every last incarnation of it) and what? Grocery shop? Vacuum? Do dishes? It's all a treat. Really.

Now that the kids are older, I rarely watch TV. When they are around and awake, I don't want to watch the kind of awful crime dramas I like to watch. And when they are asleep or off at school, I have, well, all those years of things to do that didn't get done when the kids were smaller. Just the other day I was cleaning out my closet and found half-written thank you notes for baby gifts. My son is eight now, people, and my daughter is five. I'm a little behind. But I would like to live out that fantasy of just kicking back and watching TV. I don't know. Maybe today. While I'm folding laundry. And finishing those thank you notes.

There's a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of people that those early sleepless days of parenthood are temporary, that things settle down eventually and I would sleep again. When that shift happened, I would have time for those things I ought to put off in favor of sleep now. That all made sense to me, yet I look at that picture and think about how isolated I felt and how desperately I wanted to do something that wasn't caring for an infant or sleeping, in spite of my utter, mind-numbing exhaustion. I was shocked at how completely my life, and even my body, was not my own anymore and I was determined to wrench some part of my time back to me, even at the cost of much needed rest.

I can't always see what self-care looks like. Was it good self care to push through sleep deprivation to do something that was fun for me and helped me reach out of my isolation to connect with loved ones? Or was it bad self care to add to the exhaustion that exacerbated my postpartum depression and contributed to near daily migraines?

It's something I struggle with to this day. I've had a tough week, full of difficult situations and painful emotions. And I've had to ask myself: is it good self care to skip exercise and meditation in favor of sleep or to skip sleep in favor of exercise and meditation? It's certainly not good self care to down several sugary, caffeinated Cokes and handfuls of cookies in order to stay awake. But it's also not good self care to snap at my kids and my husband because I haven't been able to carve out a quiet moment to myself to connect with my higher power and unwind.

The best I can do is feel my way through, because while I don't always know what self care looks like, I do know what it feels like, and I know, based on how I feel now, that whatever I have been doing, hasn't been quite the kind of self care I need right now.

Before my first child was born, I swore to friends and family members that I wasn't going to be one of those people. You know the kind. The ones who would pull out pictures of their newborn and expect me to fawn over it, when I (the non-parent) saw nothing more than a bald, generic infant — nothing particularly cute or interesting — just a bland, tiny thing like every other infant in every other picture from time immemorial. (I used to wish they had pulled out pictures of their dog or cat's new litter instead. Now those things are cute!) But of course, my children worked their magic on me. My son arrived — purple faced, squalling and covered in muck — and I was smitten. He was the most beautiful, miraculous thing I had ever seen. And ashamed as I was to have deserted my old beliefs, I'd shove his image (at the very least provocation) into the face of every living being I could find, knowing that people like I used to be were rolling their eyes.

When I started in recovery, I said the same thing. I'm not going to be one of those people. You know the kind. The ones that are all blah blah blah about God and spirituality all the time. After all, the vengeful God of my childhood didn't have any place in my life. And even when people were talking about a different kind of God, one that clearly enhanced their lives, well, it seemed (I admit it) so irrational, so silly, so... cheesy. I rolled my eyes at people talking about God the same way I used to when people would take out their baby pictures. God, like a newborn baby, wasn't particularly interesting or attractive until I had one myself.

Now, when people ask how I have gotten through the hard times, the answer that comes to my mind is "by developing a spirituality and a connection with the God of my understanding." Yet I'm still acutely aware of how nonsensical and unhelpful that sounds to anyone who is where I was. I can see newcomers in meetings thinking, "Oh, no. Here's some crazy lady talking about God, like that's helps with my whole my-husband-is-a-sex-addict thing." I can see them put off in the same way I was put off. And I find I'm one of those people again. I'm the person I used to roll my eyes at. I'm the delighted mom, with a wallet full of pictures of God: my God, which is beautiful and life-changing to me, but looks just like every other bland, generic, troublesome higher power to everyone else.

Many years ago, before we had children, my husband bought me a small fish tank for my birthday. At the time, I wanted a car. I didn't really think he could buy a car, but I was relying on a very iffy public transit system to get to work, so I half hoped. His only clue ("it's pink") did not seem encouraging, but maybe he was buying one used. From a Mary Kay lady. He was definitely very excited and spending a lot of time in preparation and whispered conferences with friends. When the big day came, he proudly unveiled the tank, complete with pink gravel.

Over the years, we've had a variety of freshwater fish, from tropical to ordinary old feeder goldfish. We once had a fish give birth to tiny babies, whose growth was somehow stunted, perhaps from my over-caution in keeping them too long in a small breeding section of the tank. When my son Austen was born, the tank was home to one large angel fish, who had outlived all the rest.

As an infant, Austen screamed -- piercing screams -- nearly constantly when he wasn't nursing, which I did nearly constantly to keep him from uttering those awful screams. He had (even for a newborn) problems sleeping. He was different, more intense, more needy from the day he was born, from before he was born. And I felt like I was living my life clutching a live grenade that could explode at any moment.

In the anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation and sheer overwhelmingness of those early days, the fish tank fell into neglect. The water got murkier as it was cleaned less often. And when the last of the fish finally died, we didn't replace them, but let the tank stand empty. My memories of that time are fuzzy -- events run together and odd things stand out, disconnected -- like one long waking dream. And one of the disconnected, fuzzy memories that's weighed on me over the years was of purposely starving the last of the fish when my son was an infant. I remember lying in bed and willing myself not to get up and feed them. I wanted to be free of them, but I felt awful letting them die. Well, they could eat the algae or they were better off dead anyway, I'd tell myself. I remember the tank getting so cloudy and black that I wasn't sure when they had died. And over the years the thought of that tank haunted me.

I eventually cleaned it up and restocked it with fish. Currently, it houses one lone goldfish, as I never have gotten back into the habit of keeping it up well enough to feel comfortable with anything higher maintenance or less hardy. But as I was feeding that fish the other night, I was overcome once again by that familiar guilt and shame for the fish I'd starved. Or, it suddenly occurred to me, had I? Had I confused a dream for reality? Wouldn't Mark have fed the fish if I hadn't? It was hard to know what happened back then. Everything was such a muddle.

I turned to my husband, who was lying on the bed, and said, "I have this memory of purposely starving my fish when Austen was born. Only I'm wondering now if it really happened that way or if it was a dream." And Mark said, "That doesn't sound at all like anything you'd do." And it was true. I've been known to bring home and tend to everything from wounded birds to baby squirrels to stray kittens. And I'm obviously the kind of person who spends years plagued with guilt and shame at the thought that I might have killed some pet fish. But I was crazy back then. Crazy with post-partum depression and anxiety and the weight of Mark's growing addiction pressing down (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time). I wasn't me. Who knows what the crazy-me did?

If Mark was right and it didn't make sense that I was a fish murderer, then what had happened? I concentrated. Wasn't Angel the only fish left in the tank when Austen was born? He was. I had written it in the baby book (one of the few things I wrote in the baby book); next to "Who was there to greet you when you came home?" I had written "Our fish, Angel." And I hadn't gone out and restocked the tank. When Angel died I left it empty. So what fish could I have killed?

Then it came to me: it was the baby fish I remembered killing, because I remember thinking I couldn't tell when they had died; the water was so murky and they were tiny and good at hiding in the plants. And the puzzle snapped together. I was lying in bed willing myself not to go feed the empty tank again, because the crazy, panicky part of my brain was telling me that I couldn't know what wasn't there. I had been feeding the empty tank after Angel died. Maybe, I thought, those little fish that I thought had died long ago were still there in the plants. Maybe they needed me to feed them. I couldn't know, and I shouldn't starve them.

The guilt and shame melted away, transforming first into relief (I was not a fish murderer!) and then into delight at the metaphor for so many of my relationships: carrying guilt and shame for years because I hadn't perpetually fed an emptiness that I thought couldn't live without me. It's a good thing Mark didn't get me a car; I wouldn't have felt nearly as bad for not putting gas in it when it broke down.

I feel very comfortable in written words, in the virtual world, but relating to people face-to-face has always been more difficult for me. I'm an introvert (meaning that time around people drains me, even when I enjoy it) and although no longer noticeably shy, I still have some underlying social anxiety. Social situations, even when I seem at east, can be riddled with fear, nervousness and stress.

Shortly after my son was born, I quit my full-time job, and hid away from the world, depressed and overwhelmed. My son was colicky and high needs, I was suffering from (in retrospect) undiagnosed post-partum depression, and my husband's addiction (although I didn't know that's what it was at the time) was exploding with the stress. Although the depression has lifted, although I've worked on myself and my recovery, although I've reached out to others online and made some fabulous real life friends, as a stay-at-home mom, I still have the luxury of not having to talk to anyone other than my family all day; I'm alone for the hours my kids are in school and there are no coworkers popping by to pull me out of my comfortable solitude. I very much like it that way, although sometimes I like it in the same way that I like snarfing down a pint of Ben & Jerry's. It's not always good for me.

Now after eight years at home (often alone) each day, I've slowly started coming back out into the world of real human voices and faces. I've started going back to real life 12 Step meetings. I've started going to weekly meditation sessions. (Yep, sitting in silence with my back turned to someone else sitting in silence. Now that's my idea of an ideal social gathering!) And I've started making phone calls here and there.

It reminds me of when I was a child and got chicken pox, just as winter was fading into spring. I got out of bed one morning and saw a small clear blister on my wrist. I picked at it (leaving a scar that remains to this day), then I noticed another and went to show my mother, who held a palm to my burning forehead and diagnosed me on the spot with chicken pox. I spent a few weeks (I think) miserable and feverish in bed, until the illness passed and it was time for me to go back to school. When that first blister had appeared, the trees were bare, dark and skeletal. But when I emerged again, healed, I walked outside and looked down the street. What had been stark and barren weeks before had been transformed, and I gasped to see that the world had turned a soft new green. Spring seemed to have arrived overnight.

When I had chicken pox, I was closed off from the world for weeks, and the world changed without me knowing it. With my son's birth, I fell into a kind of solitude that lasted for years, and as I slowly emerge into the world again now, I find I have changed without fully knowing it. The social situations I used to fear feel more comfortable now than ever before, and I'm finding those bare branches of mine are startlingly green.

I have a secret. I have been grieving over my children since, at times, before they were even born. Now that's not the way it's supposed to be, is it? I'm a mama, and mamas are supposed to be joy and love and acceptance for our whole lives long, from the moment of conception onward. At least, good mamas are. If we have expectations that aren't met, we're supposed to toss them out for all we do have, without a hint of regret; we're not to pack them away gently in the box with the baby clothes, stored in the attic because we can't quite bear to part with them yet.

My lowest moments in parenting -- the ones I want to stuff away in shame and never let my children or the world see -- are the ones where I couldn't accept that my children were themselves rather than my vision of them. They're the times I grieve the loss of what never was, and now go on to grieve the grieving.

My son Austen was only a few weeks old when I held the Worst Mother in History awards ceremony and handed myself the trophy. The qualifying event took place around 2 or 3 a.m. when my son was just a few weeks old. (No one else made it to the ceremony at that hour, but that was ok; I had no competition -- I never do -- since I am always running against myself, beating my previous lows. Those imagined, perfect other moms don't get to run.) Unlike other babies -- the TV babies, the parenting book babies, the babies with good moms who did things right -- my son wouldn't sleep anywhere but in my bed next to my body, which my (ex) pediatrician said was BAD and DANGEROUS.

So, on the night of my first worst moment as a parent, I nursed him for what felt like the two hundredth time and gently placed him in his bassinet for the two hundredth time, only to have him scream like the fuzzy warm blankets were full of blood-burning fire scorpions, the same way he had every single time I'd tried this for the twenty or thirty nights in a row. And that scream broke me. Bone tired and viciously angry, I picked him up roughly, looked him straight in his tiny screaming face and whispered, with venom and hatred in my voice, "You are a bad baby!" Oh. My. God. What was I saying? Was I insane? I was berating a tiny baby for... Being a baby. I broke down crying in exhaustion and shame, took him into the BAD, DANGEROUS bed, and was silently grateful that he was too tiny to see that I had been disappointed in him. Already. At a few weeks old.

When Austen was a year old, we went to a mama and baby music class. Now that's the kind of thing good mamas do, right? There I was, enriching my child's mind already at one. But he was having none of it. A class full of toddlers is never a model of disciplined attention, but even here I could see he was... different. He didn't have any interest in the bright, perky teacher or the other kids or even the musical instruments, which used to make him flinch and frown. He'd wander away from the circle where everyone else was engaged and stand staring out the window. I'd try to coax him back, thinking, "Why can't you be like the others? What am I doing wrong?" I was so traumatized by the feeling of something off, that we didn't sign up for another session.

A year later, when he still wasn't speaking and psychologists and therapists were starting, amidst a battery of tests, to whisper the word "autism," we tried a Gymboree class. "He needs to work on socializing with other children," they said. Again, there were all the other kids, enraptured at story time, while my son crawled through the same tunnel over and over and over again, alone. I'd get in the car, strap him into his car seat and sob quietly over the steering wheel, not wanting him to see that he'd disappointed me again before he'd even reached the age of three. And again, when the session ended, I couldn't bear to go back, but by that time it was clear he needed more than a Gymboree class anyway.

It was around this time that I found out I was pregnant with my daughter Janie. I was a little late and had been feeling a little queasy, so I took a home pregnancy test. My husband and I wanted a second child, eventually, but right then we were completely overwhelmed by Austen's needs. We weren't planning a pregnancy and had been using birth control. I took the test: thinking it would set my mind at ease, but fearing it would not. When that second line came up to indicate I was pregnant I sobbed, big heaving sobs of sorrow, the kind a mama is never supposed to sob when she finds out she's carrying the precious little life she's going to love and cherish. Already, before she was born, Janie disappointed me. Just by being. Being at the wrong time. I didn't feel worthy to be her mother.

I love Austen. He brings a richness and beauty to my life that wouldn't have been there if he had been the child I expected. So I don't want to admit that there was ever even a moment when I didn't love and cherish him exactly as he was, when I wanted something different, when I wanted him without the autism and his sensory issues I hadn't planned or expected. I love Janie. She's brought joy to my life that I couldn't have imagined. So I don't want to admit there was ever even a moment when I didn't want her at all or at least not when she happened to come. I don't want to admit that I had to grieve Austen's autism or grieve Janie's conception before I could arrive at the love and acceptance mamas are supposed to give as naturally as breathing. Yet I did. Shh! Don't tell anyone.

As I was brushing my hair recently, I noticed a few strands of gray. My mother's hair seemed to turn white nearly overnight in her late forties. She said it was the grief of losing two close family members within less than a year that stole its color and I always believed her. My father didn't even begin to go gray until he was in his seventies. So, being myself at the age where forty is flirting with thirty, it feels early (as far as my own family is concerned) to see silver starting to streak my hair. Yet I am oddly pleased. It's been three years since the tips of the strands at my shoulder peeked out from my scalp, so the gray tells the story of the last few years, just like the rings of a tree will tell when the weather was wet or when there was a fire. The story is one of trauma, with grief bleaching away what used to be, but it's also a story of change and wisdom.

When my son was an infant and I was home with him all day, staring and staring at his perfect and tiny face, I would be shocked to when my husband came home and shocked when I looked in the mirror: shocked by how huge and ugly and rough we looked. I suppose it's taken me all these eight years to get used to it, but I'm pleased these days by the tiny lines on my face too. I was looking at my daughter's forehead the other day and it struck me again how smooth it is. I don't know when the furrows on my brow became permanent -- I thought they had always been there, like the creases on my hands that a palm reader interprets -- but looking at my daughter I know that this must not have been the case. At some point those lines were created on my face, worn in by repeated use, and from the look of them, that use was a lot of furious thinking.

When I was in college, one of the administration buildings (which was many things before it was filled with offices) had a set of ancient stone steps leading to the door. Each one was worn down so much, that they looked almost like a series of bowls, and water would pool in them when it rained. Whenever I walked slowly up and down those steps (since deliberation was necessary on the uneven surfaces), I would think of all the hundreds of feet that had gone before me, each one wearing away the stone a little more. It didn't seem a sad thing to me that the stone was disappearing or that it was no longer flat; instead, it seemed beautiful to think of all that had gone into making them worn and imperfect.

Image credit: Photo by F.S.M. on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I've calculated the precise moment at which mothering instincts kick in, and that moment is 3:30 a.m.

Actually, I'm extrapolating a little. I'm not sure that it was actually 3:30 a.m. the very first time my own mothering instincts kicked in. I'm not sure what time it really was, because I was (understatement coming) a little out of it in the wake of my son's birth. But it felt as dark and hushed and lonely, as scary and large as 3:30 a.m. when I handed that tiny newborn over to a nurse for a routine blood test. I can still see how tiny his foot was as she drew it out of the swaddling blanket to prick it, and I can still hear how he wailed as if he were experiencing unimaginable torture as those tiny red drops beaded on his heel. I wanted to grab him away from the nurse and scratch her eyes out and never let anyone touch him again. And when it was all over, I apologized to him for letting someone hurt him -- even though I knew that particular blood draw was in the best interest of his health and safety -- and I cried and cried as I held him. It was then that I really knew, really felt in every part of me, that I was his mama.

My daughter Janie had her little five-year-old friend Valerie from kindergarten sleep over recently. After lots of giggling and playing and holding hands and snuggling, after they finally fell asleep, I dimmed their bedroom lights, closed the door and climbed into bed myself. I used to be a heavy sleeper -- my college roommate had to shake me once to get me to hear the fire alarm that was going off in our building -- but now I have super powered Mama ears, carefully attuned to the whispering sound of little feet on the hall carpet.

At 3:30 a.m. I heard those whispering feet, knew them as Valerie's and ran to get her. She saw me and burst into tears, "I want my mommy!" I scooped her up and she clung to my neck whimpering, "Where's my mommy? I want my mommy." I walked into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, with Valerie's head tucked under my chin, and rubbed her back.

"I'll tell you what," I whispered, "It's the middle of the night right now, but your mommy is supposed to come join us for breakfast in just a few more hours when it gets light out. Why don't you stay here and rest with me for a little while and see if you can sleep a little more. But if you don't feel better in a few minutes, we'll call your mommy. Ok?" Valerie nodded and nestled closer.

As I held her, there in the night, I had that same feeling I had when the nurse handed me back my newborn son: that I was her (temporary) mama and it was my job to lunge at all things hurtful and scary and scratch their eyes. I thought about how much her own mama loved her and wanted her safe. And I knew that, there in the night with the shadows crowding close, I was the nightlight keeping watch over her, the eyes her mother left behind to guard her.

In a few minutes, Valerie's breathing was soft and slow, as she drifted off to sleep again with her head on my chest. I inched her slowly down onto the bed; then I climbed in next to her, pulled the covers over us both and put an arm over her to protect her from needles and ax murderers and big, scary monsters and rats and bears and child molesters and dark shadows. And I stayed there until Janie jumped on us, and they both ran from the room giggling in the morning light.