"I recall, on my elder daughter's birth, wondering when I would start
to feel like a mother. It's not that I hadn't "bonded" with
her--that term seemed inadequate to describing the unprecedented
closeness I felt to this beautiful, puling creature that latched on
to me with such ferocity and that fit into my folds so easily. It's
that "mother" seemed dependent upon a consciousness on her part that
couldn't possibly have been there yet--on an ability to call me by a
name that no one had ever used before.
In retrospect, the feeling came long before she used the name. I
don't know exactly when, though. And it's curious to me that the
explosive change that is birth--the before and after it determines in
one's life--is actually far less powerful than a much more gradual
development into an awareness of motherhood, or (perhaps more
accurately, of what might be called 'mummyhood.'" (Maggie, Connecticut)
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