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What Has Happened To Me?

 No woman will deny that after having a baby, and becoming a mother, not only her lifestyle changes, but she is a changed person as well. This is clearly evident in the first few years of the baby’s life, as I found out.

 Have you ever noticed how natural it is when you talk to a baby, your voice leaps to a higher pitch, you speak in a singsong way and your face looks funny? Imagine a mother engrossed with singing to her baby a nursery rhyme, completed with face gestures and hand movements, in public. She looks and sounds like a singing three year old in a thirty-something body. I used to feel funny inside and a wee bit uncomfortable when I see mothers like that; and I still do. Do they have to go to that extreme? Well, to be honest, *grin sheepishly* I did that too when my kids were very young. When I think back, I always wonder what happened to me. I was a young mother enjoying the moments of motherhood.

 I was having a meeting with a group of friends a few months after my first son was born and suddenly I went “Oooooohh!” and gripped my chest and slumped on to the table. Luckily they were all girl friends and they stopped, stared and waited. What happened to me? I was having a letdown of milk. I was a breastfeeding mom.

Ever since my children came along, my vocabulary changed. No, it did not expand; it had, like I said, changed. At the clinic where I worked, my job involved analysing body fluids. One day I found myself saying to a patient, ‘Could you collect a bit of “wee-wee” please?’ I meant urine. And when I say “poo-poo”, I meant stool. Of course, “pet-pet” was the private parts. And “ngiau-ngiau” meant ‘bad mood’, referring to my boss when I spoke to my husband regarding my day.

 I never found Jim Carey in the movie, Ace Ventura amusing. But I found myself going “Mmmmm...DELICIOUS!” and “Ha! Ha! I told you so!” with all those Jim Carey facial expressions. My neighbour once found me hopping like a kangaroo in my house, with my two boys, following the leader. What happened to me? I was just a mother adapting to the phases my boys were going through in their childhood.

 I hated housework, especially cleaning up. Before my children came along, I would be lazing around after a meal with my family, hoping some one would volunteer to do the dishes. After opting to stay at home with two young boys, my aunt commented one day, on how “domesticated” I had become as I rose naturally from the table, gathered the dishes and started washing up. What has happened to me? I suppose you could call it training from being a mother. But I know, there are worse things a stay-at-home mother has to clean up compared to just dishes! By the way, I still hate housework.

I have found myself shedding more tears in the short years I have experienced motherhood than all my earlier years put together. Similarly I have found myself on my knees, praying earnestly for my family than ever before. And I cry and yearn, not always because of my children. Somehow it has become so easy to get teary, whether it is joy or sadness, so easily touched at heart and pacified from ill feeling. By some means, my heart has softened though my hands have roughened. While my spirit has mellowed when once it was obstinate, the love I possess for people and nature has broadened when it used to be selective. What has happened to me?

 I have become a mother.

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