I look down at my newborn child, my firstborn, and of all the thoughts and feelings and images filling up my impossibly expanded heart, the one that is the clearest, the loudest, the most immediate and insistent, is this: He is mine. The ferocity of it swells within me and I cannot stop thinking it over and over. He is mine. All my life I was borrowing other people’s children. All my life, I had no claim beyond an enchanted, distant affection. But not now. Not with this one. He is mine.
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I can hold him for as long as I want. I never have to give him back. I can do as I please. I don’t have to explain my actions or ask permission. I don’t have to stay in the room and make sure I don’t move too suddenly and alarm the mother. I am the mother now. I don’t always have to check the time to make sure I don’t hog the baby. I’m hogging this one all I want.
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I look down at him, a sort of gloating affection on my face. No other baby looks quite like him. No other baby ever had any of me running through his veins. He is the better version of me. Half of him is me and it’s my better half. He took the best of both of us and we can see it in every generous, chubby line of him, every insanely soft part of him.
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He is beautiful, my heart sings. He is strong. He is mine. Mine, mine, mine!
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It is my turn now. And beneath the natural anxiety of “Oh, my God, what all do I do now?” is that savage pride, that undeniable claim that he is my own. My son. I can hold him as long as I like, take him wherever I like. If I want to wake him up in the middle of a nap because I can’t resist the drug of him in my arms, and endure the storm he’ll give me over that, I can. If I want to change his little outfits five times, I can. If I want to drift with him through every room in my beautiful house, I can. If I want to hold him and stare at him for hours without ever surrendering him to another person, I can.
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The freedom of it! It springs up from the same source as the freedom I felt when I fell in love with his father. I was so caught by how free I was to touch this man, smile at him, wake him up to love me, gaze at him for an eternity or two. I didn’t have to be careful of my looks or cautious with my whispered words. He was mine. I didn’t have be remain friendly but ultimately distant so his wife or girlfriend wouldn’t grow suspicious. I didn’t feel that instinctive distance from him because someone else had a claim to him. He was mine! I claimed him. I was the wife, the girlfriend, the lover, and I was free to love him as long, as freely, as boldly, as publicly as I wanted. No walls, no limits, no sociably acceptable exchanges. The freedom of acknowledging and letting loose our love at last absolutely dizzied me. And now I have another person who binds me close to him and frees me all over again. My heart has stretched and swelled to twice its size to hold all that infinite love. I’m surprised my ribs haven’t cracked with the sheer mass of emotion.
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I gaze down on that utterly defenseless face, that perfect, tiny, shockingly fragile skull and the savagery I feel astonishes me even though I was prepared for it. I would die for him. I would sacrifice myself without a thought to protect him. No one will lay a hand on him if they expect to pull that hand back whole. My blood has changed color a bit from ordinary red to fiery crimson. It’s a different feeling from the fierce protective passion I felt for my mate when he became mine. I knew, as I know now with my son, that I would die to save him. I would protect my mate at any cost. But the intensity and single-mindedness of that urge never reached the critical mass of what I am feeling now as my son makes those heartbreakingly soft noises in sleep. Suddenly the world I lived in for so long has received a warning thrummed through the earth at my feet, radiating out in ripples to reach every living thing: don’t touch my child.
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I feel the tears in my eyes start blurring my vision. He is so perfect. He is my son. He is mine. Mine.
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