Realizing you are a mother already... a childless mother.

I didn't even realize I had already become a mother.

I'd been medicating myself dutifully, caring for the OCD that had grown out of control and threatened to take over my whole being. Learning late in life to mother yourself is still mothering. I recovered from a terrible relationship in record time, because I figured out how to mother myself out of obsessing over someone clearly and definitively incorrect for me. He also will remain forever crucial to my life direction for telling me that I'd be a terrible mother. Whenever I dare to drift out of the sanity lane and think kindly on this person, I remind myself that he said that to me, and then I self-correct.

I created a business whereby I professionally mother beings who were somehow, crazily willing to pay me to come to their homes and do what mothers do- support, encourage, organize, suggest, and nudge them toward their personal and professional goals. Not to congratulate myself but as an example of professional mothering, I wrote and read eulogies aloud for one client, who had two dogs pass away on the same day.  The things that only a mother would do, or not judge someone for doing.

I took in dingy, handicapped animals and saw them through the remainder of their aimless little lives. I took over a writer's group from a friend who had to move on as his wife was actually having actual children and then mothered the writers and actors that came into and out of the group. I mothered various strangers at a public writers gathering every Tuesday night for three years in a bar, where I even mothered one of the bartenders... and then the bartender's family when he died in a car accident.

I write this not to deify myself but to explain how, in the absence of a child, a person can compulsively mother others and not always to positive ends.  Ann Landers (or Eleanor Roosevelt- two exemplary professional mothers) brilliantly wrote than no one can take advantage of you without your permission- so I gave permission far and wide for myself to be turned inside out for the betterment of others, friends, lovers, strangers and anyone with a limp.

My sisters and I share this obsessive mothering genome. We were raised by the consummate professional mother - who lost her mother early and tragically.  Our mom lost the template of how to be a mother at the age of sixteen, so she covered all the bases by mothering the hell out of us and everyone she ever met. If my mother were to write a memoir, the title would be, "You'll Never Guess Who I Sat Next To On The Plane"- she collects everyone she comes across and mothers them into submission. My mother was a kindergarten teacher in Harlem for nearly 20 years, so she mothered in the trenches with the best of them.  So, I come by my mother instinct honestly. Lexapro does help. A tad.

But as I write these words, with three dogs, a cat and my beloved all hanging in the kitchen with me, I am simultaneously struggling with my fear of finally becoming a real, true, actual, factual and no give backs mother.  I'm terrified actually. I can't possibly be considering myself as someone else's mother. I feel huge surges of selfishness roiling just under the surface. I have nightmares where I lose my baby because I just really wanted to take a nap.  What if I just don't feel like being a mom one day? Can I take a day off from being a mom? I don't think so. I worry less about being a not good mother than about spontaneous urges to go AWOL once I am irretrievably given a child to be a mother to.

I'm terrified of not being able to find time to write again. To exercise, to drink to excess with friends in a bar, to take a walk when I feel like it or see a movie just because. It feels so petty and spoiled but it's true.

Worst of all, all I seem to see in the news is evidence of mothers and fathers who do horrific things to their children. This is the factory where our future child is being manufactured. So not only do we get someone else's kid, but they get to make the child to their damaged specifications, then we get to live with and shape the rest of our lives around the rest of it.  Good times.

I run free with doubts of my ability to do this, to mother someone who actually needs to be mothered, but truth be told- every time my fiancee and I see a baby of any race, age, gender, we play a little game. He'll turn to me or I'll turn to him and say, "OK, someone just hands you that baby and says, "Here's your child." And we smile at each other and say. "OK. That's our kid."