Or that I'm not as stricken with the maternal urges as I used to be.
Really, I just think I've become better at controlling them, but they're still there.
When my housemates' infant (I live cooperatively now with a family with children) cries, I no longer crave to take him from the rocker and sing lullabies to him. I do, however, have intense heartaching urges when they ignore him. One day I couldn't stand to wait longer than 60 seconds of his waking cries--that had become desperate screams--before I retrieved him from their bedroom because they were "busy" outside in the gardens. I had him quieted down to whimpers by the time they came inside the open door and mumbled something like, "Oh, thanks, we couldn't hear him." Their 30 month old I also feel compelled to care for, especially since her little brother was born and they have started to neglect her development. She, at a critical time of toddlerhood, has become a whiney shadow in their distracted midst. There are days when I feel ripped at my seams because there's only so much I can do with/for her. I read an average of a book per day with her (this morning I read three). I find myself compulsively reinforcing her tremendous speech development or intervening in her behavior (second nature to me as I'm a behavioral therapist) and even interpose when she wanders out the open front door and down the sidewalk when her father falls asleep on the couch. Although she does get to tag along to a ton of educational public events with her parents, at home she is encouraged to be completely independent, even when the parents are available.
Impressive, right? No, she's only two--this is the time to be constantly interacting: independence (that which doesn't develop naturally during the "terrible twos") should be encouraged later. I can only imagine how loquacious she'd be if they actually talked to her around the dinner table. They obviously did great with her, because she's brilliant and so very advanced for 30 months, but she's starting to tantrum because they ignore her unless she's repeatedly whining or screaming requests.
I digress.
I guess my point is [at the risk of sounding full of myself]
I think I'd be a great mother.
I even think I would have been a great mother at 21.
Why did my own amazing mother, then, think I wouldn't have been?
She never said I wouldn't have been a good mother, she implied I couldn't have been.
She explicitly expressed that she felt she would have been obligated to raise the child.
Not be a grandmother to my son, but "to be a mother again."
She has no idea how much it hurt me to say that.
And I can't bring myself to tell her.
