How I Became a Mom — by Heather Cain

My mom with me and my brother.

When I was 3 months pregnant with my oldest son my mom died. My husband and I were out of town – my friend’s dad had died of cancer and we traveled from California to Oregon for his funeral. I remember popping my anti-nausea pill before setting out, wondering what Jenny felt like as she prepared to say a last official good-bye to her father. The whole process seemed so distant, like something that happened to other people.

Sitting in the memorial service my thoughts wandered over my own experiences of loss. I had lost a baby to miscarriage a year earlier and experienced that grief in a very real way. Though I had not forgotten the heartbreak of that time, the new baby who had just begun fluttering in my body brought a renewed sense of hope. I tried to picture my own dad dying. It was hard to do, difficult to even imagine my strong rock-climbing father succumbing to the ultimate reality of life. Then I tried to picture my mom dying. Ha – not possible! I couldn’t even fathom losing her and quickly shut the idea out of my mind.

At the reception following the memorial service we chatted about Jenny’s dad’s life and heard funny stories about things he had done. We exchanged pleasantries with strangers – yes, I threw up every day; no, we didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl. We ate cheese and crackers. Then the phone call came. It was my brother in California. My husband held his hand over the receiver as he said, “your mom is sick or something.” Another call came in, he answered it, and the most dreadful sentence of my life rang quietly through the room – an agonized and gut-wrenching “no.”

The rest of the day is a blur. The next thing I remember I was outside the house, had unknowingly run up the road and collapsed on the sidewalk. Jenny was seconds behind me and threw herself on top of me. She clung to me and the three of us sat there, Jenny, me and my baby, two of us sobbing at the agony of having a dear one wrenched from us too soon, the other one wriggling around as a faint reminder of new life. Two very emotionally controlled girls, sobbing their hearts out in the middle of a neighborhood of strangers, an unborn baby between them. It was a sacred moment, one that makes me tremble as I write about it.

Unable to catch a soon enough flight, we rented a car and drove home through the night.
I clutched my barely-showing belly and cried during the entire nine hour drive. The pain and sorrow were so real and overwhelming that they were scary. In the jumble of racing thoughts I kept thinking, “what if I lose this baby too?” I cried so much that I had scabs on my eyelids by the time we got home. My skin hurt.

We hugged a lot, cried a lot. Asked a lot of questions. We had the memorial service. I knew how Jenny felt.

I did not lose the baby – he grew and grew and we got ready for his arrival. We registered and read books and watched videos and took classes and painted and I somehow never felt prepared. It was as if not having a mom made it impossible for me picture myself as a mom. I had no one to answer those questions, the really important ones that only your mom knows the answer to. Who would be in the room with me when I gave birth? Who would hold the crying newborn when I was sleep-deprived and needed to take a hot shower? Who could I call when I was at my wit’s end and didn’t trust anyone else to still love me when they saw what a pitiful excuse for a new mother I really was?

And then Moses came. When they placed him on my belly I was scared that I had just been handed someone who I loved even more than my mother.

I didn’t feel like a mom as I left the hospital. I felt exactly like I had felt before I got there, only about 10 pounds lighter and beat up. Everything went exactly as I had expected it to – I missed my mom; I didn’t know what to do; I did it anyways. We didn’t sleep, I nursed all the time, he made eye contact with me and drove his soul deeper into my heart.

Three weeks later I almost died of a post-partum hemorrhage. Part of my placenta had been left inside my uterus and caused it to bleed uncontrollably. As I lay on the table waiting for the d&c and blood transfusion that would keep me alive, I thought, “Here I come, mom!”

Just before the doctors entered, I caught a glimpse of my haggard husband standing in the doorway. He was holding our 3-week-old baby, trying for the first time in both of their lives to feed him a bottle of formula. His eyes were full of fear, the baby was screaming at the insult of having something rubber jammed into his mouth. In that moment I became a mother. I looked at that helpless little baby, heard my blood splashing onto the emergency room floor, and something in me clicked. I was a mother. I didn’t need to know what I was doing. I didn’t need my mom to still be alive to validate the fact that I was a mother. I just was one. I loved that confusing screaming hungry bundle in my husband’s arms, and I was not ready to leave him.

I didn’t leave him, of course. He is 4 and his little brother is 1. That ache in my heart has faded to the background, though I still have a pile of questions I wish I had someone to ask. I still feel like I don’t entirely know what I am doing. But I do feel like a mom. And it is a pretty great feeling.

From Heather Cain of Junie None.

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Note from Design Mom: for the duration of my pregnancy, I'll be posting advice, memories and stories about pregnancy, childbirth, adoption and growing a family on Wednesdays. You can find them all by clicking here. I'd love to hear your story or memory or advice, feel free to submit it to gabrielle@designmom.com.