[title subtitle=”words and images: Jessica Sowards “][/title]
I became a mom when I was nineteen. Shortly before midnight on a Wednesday in November, my son came fast. It was harder than I thought it would be. I remember screaming out, “I can’t. I can’t,” then in a moment, a beautiful, messy boy was flailing on my chest and I realized I could. I whispered, “Oh, my little love,” and I was a mother.
In the wee hours of that morning, when the room was dark and quiet, with a clean and swaddled baby sleeping in a clear plastic bassinet next to my bed, I let my hair down. It was long back then, curling down to a couple of inches above my hips. A nurse came and paused at the door, realizing maybe she had stepped into something intimate. I smiled at her, welcoming her in.
I hadn’t worn my hair down in months. We were too broke to afford things like haircuts, and I was too swollen and miserable to do much more than shower every day. My long, brown hair had spent the better part of my pregnancy in a tight knot on the back of my head. Then, at three in the morning right after I first met my son, I sat in that hospital bed, brushing tangles out of my hair and staring at my baby like it was my job to memorize every feature of him.
The nurse, I wish I knew her name, checked my vitals and said she needed to take the baby to the nursery. I nodded my approval, and she said, “You’d do good to sleep.” I nodded again and began gathering my hair to tie it back up. The nurse, slightly sheepish again, said, “You should leave it down. You’re a beautiful woman with all that hair.”
“Then, at three in the morning right after I first met my son, I sat in that hospital bed, brushing tangles out of my hair and staring at my baby like it was my job to memorize every feature of him.”
Now, I can’t be certain, but that is the first time I remember anyone ever calling me “woman.” I’ve thought a lot about it, and I assume at some point before then, someone must have thrown that word at me and maybe I just didn’t pick it up and put it on. I was a girl, comfortable maybe with the title young lady. But woman? I had never been a woman before. Then all of a sudden, there I was, a woman and a mother, sitting in a hospital bed sometime between midnight and morning with a cloud of hair surrounding my shoulders and a baby to raise.
He’ll turn fourteen this year. In the mornings, he comes into my room and waits for me to take him to school. Sometimes, in the groggy time of just-barely-awake, when he leans casually against the door jam with the hall light shining behind him, I am struck by the breadth of his shoulders. I can hear the promise in his voice that manhood is nearing. I watch him all the time. Him, and his younger brothers. They can’t possibly know the way I study them.
Mother and woman are comfortable coats to wear now. I’ve broken them in, worn them out, patched them up a bit. They are mine. But there have been seasons where I put other coats on top of them. Seasons that I chased other things. There were seasons of my life that I stopped studying them but rather became overwhelmed by simply keeping them alive and cared for. In those times, I always took them for granted.
I’ve never been a bad mom, but I’ve been a distant and distracted one. More than that, I’ve been a fearful one. For a long time, I lived with a certainty that I would fail my sons. It’s a terrible thing to live in fear of failing what you love most. I worried over them as if my worry would prove my love. I criticized my husband, as if maybe I could make him good enough to make up for my own flaws.
Then, somewhere along the way, I stopped all of that. I traded in my fighting gloves and the coat I’d been wearing called “mom-guilt,” and I decided to rest in grace. I looked at how God has been a Father to me and decided to try His way instead. It is a way without fear, but rather one lavished in peace, and patience, and kindness. I decided to choose my babies every day, and to model to them how He has chosen me. It has made all the difference.
I’ve learned enough in parenting now to understand I still have so much left to learn. I’m sure those lessons will come, some gently with time and the organic growth of realization, and some hard and mean, with the rude reminder of failure. I’ll be a student to both kinds. I’ll be a student studying their hearts like I might be handed a quiz at any moment.
In just a handful of years, Jack will be the same age I was when he made me a mother. I suppose around that time the word “man” will find him. It will wrap itself around him like a coat. I wonder if it will be baggy at first. I wonder if it will surprise him the way the word “woman” surprised me.
I don’t know who he will be then. I don’t know what kind of change he may have on this world. I do know one thing though. I’ll be there studying him and loving him the best I know how, just as I have since a Wednesday night in November all those years ago, since the night I became a woman and a mother.
To watch Jessica’s garden tours, visit her YouTube channel, Roots and Refuge.
