Conversations with My Mom

A long time ago, way back before I was on the SMC path, I'd offered for a good friend of mine to potentially move in with me so she could go to college in my city. S is 18, very mature (she's dealt with multiple major medical issues in her young life, leading to her having to grow up very quickly), very quiet, very intelligent, and very responsible. I saw S recently, and we had a conversation in which I told her my SMC plans, and then mentioned that if I ended up needing to hire a live-in nanny for some reason, we may have to reevaluate her moving in with me, as the house would be getting pretty cramped by then. Then I threw in, "Unless you want to be my nanny, of course!", in a kind of half-kidding type of way. She answered, totally seriously, "I'd LOVE to be your nanny!".

AWESOME. (seriously)

So, then I told my mom about this, and she said, "Wait, are you giving away my job?!".

I can't tell you how happy that made me!!! I mean, my parents have talked about moving up here, but I guess I never realized they were completely serious. And, honestly, I won't totally believe it until they close on a house and the moving truck pulls up, but this comment made me feel so good! Not only that they're serious about moving up here, but also that she really wants to have a major role in taking care of my baby while I'm at work. Which will save me SOOO much money, plus my baby will get to have a great relationship with her grandmother. This is will be my parents' first grandchild, so that's a plus.

Then, today, in another conversation with my mom, she said something about how she hopes I have a baby that's as easy as I was. She said I was a pretty easy baby, but that my sister, who came next, wasn't even close to the same (which, knowing my sister, doesn't surprise me AT ALL!). And then came my brother, who was fairly easy, but not as easy as me. I told her what people say, that if you have an easy baby the first time, you better not have another one, because you probably won't be so lucky again! Not that that was the slightest bit helpful, 30-something years later!

We again touched on how she feels about me doing the whole SMC thing, and she said, "I'm just having a little bit of a tough time with it, because this isn't what I wanted for you". I told her that it isn't what I wanted for me, either, but that I'm really happy to be on this path - much happier than I was before I was on it, and was just muddling along trying to find a father....er... husband. She knows I'm happy, and she's happy that I'm happy, but she's still a little stuck in feeling like she really wanted this to work out differently for me. I don't know if it has anything to do with the fact that my sister is a (currently single) lesbian, so she doesn't have any daughter at all who's going about this in the "normal" way. And while my brother is married, they aren't so close to my parents, and they may never have children. So, out of 3 kids, she doesn't have a single one who's run-of-the-mill. We didn't talk about that specifically, but I realized it later and wonder if it's occurred to her in that way.

My mom does, though, fully realize that once the baby comes, she's going to be totally enthralled with her grandchild and not have such an issue with how he or she came to be. She told me she was at the Y the other day (she teaches water aerobics), and she saw a young mom with a little 1.5-2 year old girl in a very cute bathing suit getting into the pool. She thought, "awww, she's so cute" and thought of me, and realized how excited she's going to be when my baby's born. So, she gets it, she's happy for me, just still a little stuck on her dream of wanting things to have happened differently for me. As I think I've mentioned before, I think she has to grieve the loss of "the dream", just as I did.