Sigh… It has been a while since I could gather my thoughts about my journey as a mother. Motherhood is perhaps the most complicated journey a person may take. Think about it, even if one is a seasoned mother and has several children, a woman will always tell you how different the experiences are. That even motherhood will be different from one child to the next.
I have just one kid, but every day I seem to meet multiple versions of his growing self. These various versions of him evoke various versions of myself. No experiences are similar as each day is completely different from the next.
As my little tyke is about to step over the one-and-a-half-year milestone, he is beginning to understand that he is his own person and that he is the master of his own body. He tests out his limits to your frantic yells of panic when he does dangerous things. And it is always dangerous things that interest him the most as he has no sense of fear.
His new habit is climbing on the TV unit. Calm down, people, the unit is shorter than him with obviously no TV on it. He climbs on the unit, stands up on it, stomps about and gets off cautiously as he has been taught since he started crawling. However, as he became more confident in his stunts, I observed him adding new elements to his routine. Peeking over the edge with his toes, trying new descent moves, adding this and that to make his stunt a little more complex.
My husband and I debate over the purchases of new furniture and items as my mind whirls with fear of how he might incorporate those items into his fearless persona.
Any parent would not ask me, “Well, why don’t you stop him, then?” Only people without kids would ask that. At this age, kids have tunnel vision; they see what they want and go for it. You can try to stop them, you can shout in terror, you can even redirect his attention to something else. But if that child is laser-focused on doing what they want, the only thing that will stop them is accomplishing their goal.
Which makes my new job: the spotter. My work as a mother now is to follow precariously behind him all the time or stand within accessible distance. At this rate, my job is to intercept a possible disaster. We cannot interfere with the curious mind of a growing child just as we can't stop a river from flowing. The only thing we can do is to be there. Be their safety net, be the person who teaches them how to approach things precautiously and comfort them when they learn the hard way.
