The Story I Told Myself to Lift my Spirits While Mothering
The Baby Story
“Do you want me to tell you The Baby Story?” I asked the curly hair boy tucked in his second-hand toddler bed that I got from a couple who was changing duty stations.
My baby, as if the day had not been arduous. As if I hadn’t lost my cool more times than I cared to remember, nodded his head with so much enthusiasm his beachy curls bobbed covering up his eye for a few seconds. He had heard this story many times. It was the story I told him to remind him that no matter what happens during the day, he was and will always be my gift.
Deep inside, I knew it was a story I told myself to remind me that this was the gift, I chose. Motherhood was terrifying most of the time and frustrating for a good chunk of it. Hence, I had to hold on to these times when it was just him and I. Our obnoxiously loud air conditioning and second-hand mismatched furniture. And The Baby Story—our story.
“Okay, but you have to listen.”
My baby’s eyes went super wide, and once again, his curls tussled when he nodded. Those were my curls, my nose, my lips. ‘Pin-pun,’ my family would say. Pin-pun means ‘just like you’ in Dominican slang. Back then, I used to wonder if that’s why his dad left. There was so little of him in our baby.
