Reflections on the Year

Here I am 9 months preggo at a my baby shower!

( My cousin in the background was probably newly pregnant at the time, she had her son in late February this year..how fun!)

Just born....

...about a year later!

It's not January, but the past week has held a lot of reflection. I know it is mainly because our little girl is turning one. It's funny how different events order our lives. Through the many years of schooling I was oriented more toward the year beginning in September. For now I guess my world is more and more about the celebration of new life marked by the birth of my daughter.

I year ago at this moment I was in the local hospital in my final hour of labor. The pushing began around midnight. The next 45 minutes seemed to fly by until at last my little girl emerged from her cozy cocoon, took her first gurgly breaths and blinked at the ferocious light. Those first tiny cries....now babbles with a myriad of expression and the beginnings of words.

A few nights ago I looked through all the photos from the last year and felt myself falling more and more in love with my daughter. As she's learned to walk over the past few months, I can relate to those first tenuous steps. As new mom, though well educated in the field of child development and infancy, I was still sometimes so unsure of what to do. I can vividly remember the agonizing despair of those moments when I could not seem to soothe my own crying infant. There were the ongoing disappointments of breast feeding not going how I had imagined. The polarity of feelings of relief to return to a job in which I felt a measure a competency, and the grief of becoming a working mom...something I had never imagined I would do while any of my children were still so young.

Becoming a mom has turned my world inside out and upside down in ways I cannot describe. It has been a humbling and revealing experience. It has tilled up personal values I had not been so aware of, revealed weaknesses for what they are, and even still unearthed a whole new set of strengths. And now in these last past few months motherhood has begun to yield some of the sweetest of fruits of joy and laughter and love.

And though my daughter has been walking for a couple months now, she still falls a least a dozen times a day. Sometimes she gets a little ahead of where her feet can go, sometimes she trips over something, and sometimes it just for the sheer thrill of falling down. And I am so often amazed at the tears that are not shed, and how easily she is comforted from some of these spills. In fact, this past weekend, she got her first scraped knee. She wimpered a little when it happened but was quickly off to play again...I didn't even really notice the scrape until a little later on, when I got a good look at the knee. I can't help but think there is a lesson for me to learn here. As a mom I can now begin to feel the ground more firmly beneath my own feet, am learning to catch my balance, and am getting ready to run through this great adventure. It doesn't mean I won't take my own set of spills along the way, but perhaps I can mirror the resiliency of my own daughter, and even once in a while, delight in the butterflies in my tummy when I do come crashing down.