Encouraging Moms

I don’t think a caterpillar has any idea what she really is. I don’t believe she has any concept, as she scuttles from leaf to leaf, of what she will become. I believe this because in that clueless, fuzzy creature I see myself.

I remember my busy days of parading from one plant to the next, stomping from one conquest to another. In college I excelled. I learned the culture of academia: gold stars, good grades and honor rolls. Every time I triumphed over an assignment, someone was standing there with a red pen to write down my accomplishment, record my latest feat. I moved to the head of the glass and eventually to the head of the department. Hard work meant rewards and accolades and a gold cord draped around my shoulders at graduation.

Feeling undefeatable after college, I decided to tackle a whole new challenge: I wanted to be a mother. But not just any mother—I wanted to be the best mother on the entire planet. I wanted an A+ in motherhood. I set aside my writing, put my diploma in a frame, left the bread-winning to my husband and plunged in. After all, I’d been climbing big flowers and tackling all kinds of leaves for years. I was queen of the jungle in my mind.

Until the anticipated baby came. Helpless. Crying. Dependent. I couldn’t write my way out of a 4:00 a.m. fever. I couldn’t reason my way out of the horrors of colic. There was no degree that would make me less exhausted or less anxious. And that was my chrysalis moment. The moment the world got small and dark. It contracted down to me and the tiny child in my arms and my husband.

In the difficult first year of motherhood, I feared I had disappeared. I was frightened that all I’d worked for and accomplished was lost forever. In my cocoon of worry and inadequacy, I was hanging by a silk thread of sanity, curled up in myself, thinking the world had ended. I was a shell of what I used to be. I would have missed writing if I’d had a second to think of it. I didn’t. I forgot I even knew how.

When I survived three sleepless nights in a row without losing my temper, no one handed me a gold star. When I managed to pick up a bottle with my foot while keeping my finger on my daughter’s sore gums and stirring the sauce for dinner, no one gave me a 100 percent. No one applauded me the first time I managed to complete a grocery trip with a screaming baby. And even while I gave everything I had to this new life, there was a sense of disappointment. I wasn’t the greatest mother on the planet. For the first time, I feared my best efforts would result in failure.

As our first daughter grew, we welcomed another. It was one day when my older was at kindergarten I had a shocking, unexpected thought. Maybe while the baby naps today, I could write something. It came from nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. But something in my soul stretched out, reached up. I decided to try. For the next year, I sat by the crib at naptime and tapped out a story. And in those hours, my brittle chrysalis finally sloughed off and revealed something I never imagined. Motherhood had not stolen my legs. It had given me wings.

In my post-children writing, I have found a richness of emotion I never possessed before rocking a distressed baby at 2:00 a.m. I found a love I never knew until my husband came home to find me crying as hard as the baby and took us both up in his arms. I found a hope that I never felt until I looked at my daughters and dreamed of how much good they will do in the world.

There was a time I believed I gave up everything to be a mother. But motherhood gave far more than it took. Last year, that novel I wrote at my baby’s bedside won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and was purchased by one of the largest publishers in the world. This summer, I will walk into a bookstore with my daughters’ hands in mine and see it on a shelf. But it will be the girls next to me, and not the book in front of me, that I consider my greatest masterpiece.

Regina Sirois is a Kansas City native, married to her high school sweetheart, and living in Olathe with her husband and two daughters. Last year her debut novel, On Little Wings, won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and a publishing deal from Penguin.