People keep asking if I miss my son, now that I’m at work and he’s off at daycare. And when I really think about it, I am conflicted. I think about him a lot, sure. I miss seeing him smile at me even after he’s been cranky and crying for no reason. I miss the smell of his head and the way he paws at my shirt while I’m feeding him, almost in an affectionate way. But all in all, I’m not missing him the way a teenage girl might miss the boy she met over the summer, or the way you miss a recently deceased parent. It’s difficult to explain the way in which being apart from my son has affected me; I just know that things are different now and I am still getting used to my old life.

But it isn’t my old life. It’s a new life with some semblance of the things I used to do. I still have the same job, only now people look at me as a mom too. People I was once friends with on the basis of “we’re both married people” are now pushed to another category, one level higher than my single friends.  And sometimes, as I am sitting at my desk trying to gather my thoughts on what tasks I need to accomplish, I actually have a moment where I realize that I’m a mother and there’s this tiny little thing depending on me and who will need me for a good chunk of my life. It’s so mind blowing I can’t even wrap my brain around it.

Yet it all feels like some marvelous accomplishment, larger than anything I have ever tackled before; something that sort of happened but that now I am actively doing, sometimes on auto-pilot and sometimes with such close concentration that it is the sole idea in my mind. I am amazed at how much one person can love another. I thought it was something when I fell in love and got married, but giving birth to another human redefines it.

I know a lot of people who do not want children. And I never thought I’d be a mother either. But I sometimes feel badly for them because they’ll never experience what it’s like to hold the little thing in your arms and marvel at how you actually made that thing and how much it loves you unconditionally. It’s a “you don’t know what you’re missing” kind of thing, and to each his own, but it is a feeling like nothing else in the world. I am so glad I am a mother.