I had many years of exercise playing dolls. I loved it. Sort the clothes, bundle them up to go out for a walk. Strollers with impeccable white tulle sometimes and over the days they began to turn gray, it didn’t matter. Nor did they, Sabrina, Pepona or whatever name they got that day, get dirty. I could forget them because it was time to drink milk or because it was time for the “Ingalls Family” and no one could interrupt that moment (only the unbearable advertisements).
We tend to make the mistake of considering that we are all equal and will respond in the same way to a fact. Or that social conventions will be so strong that we will always fall at their feet. Luckily this is not the case, but it is not without cost.
Mayra came into our lives with wishes that it be so. Adults and with emotional and economic support to provide her with what she might need.
It doesn’t matter how much I studied or how much experience I had with children. Feeling my body change was very strange. It was as wonderful as it was uncomfortable. I didn’t feel myself, I was already another person and that distressed me. He passed by as his little kicks confirmed his presence. I found myself caressing my belly, abstracted. Singing different songs and talking to him about what we were going to do that day.
As the gifts of clothes arrived, I washed and put them away. My little girl self laughed. Again imagining, playing, putting together scenarios.
Everything was ready. The room with lots of natural light, painted a light apple green, beautiful furniture, the occasional stuffed animal and anxiety everywhere.
41 weeks of gestation. The doctors said. Scheduled cesarean section. I have rarely felt so much pain. Mayra was born on the night of May 1st.
Many mothers who deserved my respect told me that when I saw her all my discomfort would completely disappear.
How can I explain the feeling of anguish when I realized that when Mayra needed me to feed her or change her, I couldn’t move from the pain? Was she a bad mother? Had so much study and work numbed or killed my instincts?
Mayra was and is beautiful and in good health. She was almost always an emotionally stable person. Except in those early days, of course.
I was very afraid, anxious. I didn’t know how to organize my life and the feeling of chaos frustrated me. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to. That I could never be a good mother and that my professional and personal life were dead.
With Monday’s newspaper everything looks different. The hormones were raging. My body was different. Suddenly I had to call to ask for an appointment for her and I had to say “I’m Mayra’s mom” it wasn’t me anymore, just like that. My identity changed with her.
As he grew up and slept, this last point is important. Everything was falling into place.
I embrace those moments of anguish. Of pain. They allowed me to really come face to face with all the realities of motherhood.
Being a mother is not a game. But how doing it as a child helped me to be the mother I am today!
Being a mother for me is not knowing what you are going to play each day. It is being a toy and an orchestra director at every moment.
Today she and I are buddies, accomplices. Mother and daughter. Aligned in emotions and projects. Linked in rhythms that flow and can only be enjoyed. She and I fulfilled a bond of coming of age. We know how to play and play because we want to
They spent many years together with dolls, stuffed animals, little cars, drawing sheets, markers, dough. Stories, many. Inventions of spaces and characters that we changed or left.
When she was 6 years old we wrote “Pinina, the disobedient witch” together. Today she also writes.
My motherhood with Mayra is not perfect. She is honest. She is human. She is wonderful. Like her.
*Psychopedagogue
Author of the book My Environment and Me.
President of the Being Foundation