YO MAMA: I finally understand everything my mother did for me
About a week after my son was born I felt a desperate need to call my mom. There was something I had to tell her.
“Mom,” I said, skipping the usual pleasantries. “Thank you for everything you did for me.”
It took having a baby of my own to really understand and appreciate the role she had played in my life. I finally got it, what an enormous job it is — mentally, physically and emotionally — to be a mom. Having just experienced the indescribable pain of childbirth and around the clock demands of a newborn, I simultaneously felt grateful to my mom for having birthed me some 30 years ago, and guilty for having put her through it all. I hoped I wasn’t too fussy of a newborn. I’d never bothered to ask. That whole forgotten chapter of my life hadn’t much mattered to me before. But now that I too was a mother, I knew she cherished that time even if I couldn’t remember it at all.
That first week, every time I painfully nursed my son, I thought my mom did this. When I peeled myself out of bed after just 20 minutes of sleep to tend to the crying baby again, I thought, my mom did this and I’ve never thanked her.
I almost couldn’t believe anyone would choose to make such a sacrifice for another human being, but that’s where a mother’s love comes in. You would do anything for your child. That knowledge comes fast like a wave. Anything, without hesitation. A whole new emotional ceiling had opened up in my world; I hadn’t known you could love so wholly and so deeply.
I read once that the Inuit have 50 different words for snow, depending on what kind of snow it is. I don’t know how many words there are for love but if someone ever collects them all, a mother’s love is unlike any other. It’s an emotion I had never felt before. It’s very primal. The things you used to care a lot about seem silly, like what you look like when you go out or if people like your cooking. Nothing matters more than the health and happiness of your baby. Nothing.
So while I was feeling wretched for all the pain and exhaustion and frustration I’d put my mom through, I was also feeling overwhelmed that I was the recipient of such powerful love. It was almost too much emotion to bear. I suddenly had a much greater grasp of what motherhood really means and it completely changed the way I understood and valued the relationship I had with my own mother.
She came to visit us when my son was a few months old. I held him in my arms while giving her a hug in the doorway — I couldn’t even wait until she was inside. She always puts a few drops of essential oil in her moisturizer and hugging her feels like hugging a garden. As we ended our embrace my son pulled out her brightly coloured hair scrunchie. We tossed our heads back laughing at his adorable act of thievery. He must have noticed what a good time we were having because he started laughing too. That of course sent us into another fit of laughter, which proved infectious, and soon we were all gasping for breath, tears in our eyes. It was his first real laughing fit.
Later that night, she sat with him reading The Wheels on the Bus. I heard her whispering to him, “I would die for you, you know.”
I smiled. It would never come to that, of course, but that old cliche does sum up what it feels like to have a child or grandchild. It’s pure, blinding, all-consuming love.
Watching my mom reading to my son, I had another epiphany: a very similar scene would have played out some 30 years earlier between me and my grandmothers. Their love, I now realized, was so much more than a phrase at the end of a birthday card or an obligatory farewell at Christmas. It was an extension of their love for their own children. They too would die for me. I was amazed, thinking about all that selfless love handed down through generations of mothers.
So thank you to my mom and to both my grandmothers for doing all the hard things that mothers have to do and for passing down that maternal inheritance of love which I now get to share with my son.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
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