Mother and child
You suddenly wake up, half drowned in an unknown place, one could say hostile, even though everyone around you tries to make you as comfortable as possible.
You don’t know whether to cry, scream, struggle.
Forgotten feelings that resurfaced in a recent conversation.
I was moved while watching the guests at a beautiful celebration.
The older ones frolicking in a ball pool and the younger ones crawling on the carpet.
Immersed in the vapors of that kind of trance that some call “Déjà vu” (in French, “already lived,” only more than thirty years ago) I started talking to a young mother who was holding her baby in her arms.
– Oh, how pretty, what’s her name? – I asked.
– Ana – she said.
– And how old is she?
– Four and a half months.
– How beautiful! How does she behave, does she sleep well?
– Well, she gets up several times in the middle of the night….
– How difficult…
I was going to say, “how difficult it is to be a mother,” but she finished my sentence by saying:
– How difficult it is to be a baby!
I was left with my most surprised face, and she made more or less the dissertation with which I began these lines.
– Yes, imagine, suddenly they take you out of your safe place and you are in an environment that you do not know, and you cannot communicate if you are hungry, cold, or hot, or if something hurts you…etc.
I must say that I loved the change of perspective, that generous and maternal form of empathy.
In the end we blew out the candle for my son’s first birthday, sorry (déjà vu) for my beautiful granddaughter’s first birthday, and I conclude by saying:
How difficult it is to be a mother, a father, a baby, a person, but at the same time what a miracle to be able to witness how life is renewed!
Leonor Henríquez (Caracas, Venezuela) Civil Engineer by training (UCAB 1985), writer and apprentice poet by vocation. From her time in engineering emerged her Office Stories (1997), another way of seeing the corporate world. Her latest publications include reflections on grief, Hopecrumbs (2020) (www.hopecrumbs.com) and “The Adventures of Chispita” (2021) (www.chispita.ca) an allegory of life inside Mom’s belly.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com