Thoughts on Rearview Mirrors and Reflections of Love

I made a decision to have a child four years ago. First deep in the recesses of my heart and then my mind began working out the how. I thought and did a lot. I got in shape. I got my finances in better shape. This was such a proactive and productive time for a girl who had spent so little of her effort shaping her personal life.

Four years ago is also the last time I drove home. Seventeen hours from my door in Lexington, Kentucky to my mother’s arms in Houston, Texas. I have made longer drives to her healing embrace. For a few years after law school, I moved between field research on the death penalty in Texas and toiling in graduate school at the University of Michigan every six months. Twenty-two hours from the coldness, emotional and weather wise, of Ann Arbor, Michigan to the warmth of my mother’s bed. I drove alone. I drove with my sister. With a niece, a nephew and a stray friend. Although the idea of such a long drive can be daunting, I came to appreciate the solitude and the silence. But this last drive was different.

The last time I drove to Texas, I was accompanied by longings for motherhood. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror thinking about how this drive would be different with a child. Would we stop more often? How would I entertain him or her? How many times could I sing their favorite song before it drove me crazy or I drove us off the road? I imagined the face of my mother on seeing her seventh grandchild born two decades after the last. The one who lived away but was daily present through the digital magic of skype. I gently touched my belly and imagined the feeling of new life along with the tingling of a taught hand too long wrapped around a steering wheel or a foot braced too long in an effort to maintain pace.

This seventeen-hour meditation on motherhood came flooding back to me when performing the simplest act of care for my now 2 year old son. The other day I turned my son’s car seat around so that he faced forward. After I checked the security of each latch, I sat in the driver’s seat and looked at him for the first time, in real life rather than in a dream, through the rearview mirror. His perfect face was smiling at me from the safe restraints of his child seat. I knew all the things I had imagined on that drive because they had all come true. With out reaching for my abdomen, I knew the feeling of fingers caressing a belly swelling with baby. I hear almost every morning and or evening my mother’s sweet love as she says, “Hi!,” to him and he rushes to the computer to say, “Hi Grandma!” I sing his songs on demand and am able to continue even when I tire of them. He and I are now fellow travelers until he can move in the world on his own.

This boy and I have been traveling in the same car for two years but watching different aspects of the world we inhabit together. In the baby carrier that left him seeing the world only as we passed it by, he often said, “Bye bye, Mama,” as if I were gone only to reappear at day care and release him. With his cognitive abilities at that time, that is probably how he saw our daily commutes with the exception of treat or sippy cup passed back when he was older. His quiet or cooing or singing was in his small way and act of faith or, at least trust, that I would return.

I too in some ways occupied the distance between the backseat differently than I do now. He could not see me in what were sometimes my only moments free from his gaze from pick-up to bedtime. Driving was an act of solace for a woman mothering alone. A respite, if not from the duty, from the unrelenting face of the recipient of so much of your time and energy. Babies are almost all need.

But, he is not a baby anymore. Turning him around is really a reminder that as he grows, our interactions will be increasingly dialectical. His expression of will have moved beyond monosyllabic refusal to full-fledged and sometimes nuanced communications of preferences. I, as the mother, must now engage and learn to decipher when to impose what I believe is best and when to let him be the person he has transitioned into this life to be and become. This is really the hard part of mothering, not the day-to-day labors of making meals and doing laundry. I did not know this four years ago.

In retrospect, he was conceived, in part, in the reflective mood of that trip and reflection of my heart’s desire. On the eve of the completion of his second year, I am thoughtfully excited about all the things we will now see together in his next.