On the day you were born, it snowed.

Three years ago today, I lay in a hospital bed, stunned and barely able to comprehend what had gone before hours earlier, in a combination of birth-induced euphoria and morphine haze, gazing out the window. At it snowing. In March. In Vancouver. And I thought What a beautiful way to welcome my baby to the world. Beside me in a bassinet (never again to be tolerated except in his own birth induced haze and exhaustion) lay a small being who, I never cease to marvel, had been in me only hours earlier. Hours! Merely hours ago, we were one, and now we were two. 

Being pregnant and having a baby was the only time in my life where my own physicality overtook my body. I'm a cerebral human, and I value my mind more than my body (evidenced by my own complete lack of exercise over the past 34 years) but this was something new -- something my body craved and reveled in embraced completely wholeheartedly, as though I had finally found my purpose in life.

Which, of course, biologically speaking, I had.

Motherhood has been the most exhausting, infuriating, frustrating, frightening and horrifying experience of my life. I have never been more tired than when he wasn't sleeping; I have never been so frightened as when he was sick in hospital, and I have never felt more scarred and more rubbed completely raw as a human being as when, in hospital, I had to hold down my screaming child, weeping openly myself, as they did things to him that I knew hurt, all in the effort to make him better. I have rarely felt more infuriated as when he kicks me while I'm trying to change his diaper God, kid, this is gross and there's poop everywhere, now even on me and I hate doing this too and if you'd just use the damn potty this wouldn't have to happen again!, and more frustrated at the food I lovingly prepare is rejected, when for all my attempts at getting him to listen go unaided. It is not for the faint of heart, this motherhood.

Of course the counterbalance to this is that I have never loved anyone so much, so wholly, so completely, and so unconditionally. I finally truly, deep within me, understand what my father says softly, when my own sister's life was in danger in her second pregnancy, that he wasn't afraid of her losing the baby, he was afraid of losing her, that would make his life not worth living. I cannot imagine life without my son in it, I cannot for a moment let my mind wander there because it is too painful to contemplate. I lie in bed with him at night and watch his little face in sleep, feel him breathing in and out and I know the perfection of love. I know I am watching a small piece of my soul living without me. It is such a strong feeling that it takes my breath away, and the knowledge of what it is to know the divine, the feeling of love so strong to transcends everything else I have ever known, makes everything else worthwhile. I never imagined what it was to love like this. I know now I will never forget. I know that when he is 45 and has his own children and a career and a partner and a house in another city, I will still look at him and see him as a baby, as a toddler, as an older child. As part of me, part of my body, and I will look back to the days when we were one and still wish that I was there, that I could hold him entirely within me and protect him from everything. 

It's hard to believe it's been three years. I can't believe how much he has changed from the watery creature that emerged from me three years ago, with his dark sea blue eyes and his dark black hair, to the brown eyed dirty blond boy who can talk and walk and eat his own meals and tells me his ideas and asks me to play. The challenges have changed, the child has changed. But the love has not. I love him now as much as I did that small being in the bassinet, more than I ever dreamed I would. 

Happy Birthday, small boy. Mommy loves you.