The love song of a “special needs” mom

Me and my girl

During the first year of my baby’s life I wrote a book called Feeling My Way: Finding Motherhood Without Losing Myself. How little I understood, then, about the nature of motherhood, and about the nature of life itself. A baby in my own right, I thought “life” was something you artfully arranged and vigilantly protected, instead of something, well, alive, that happened all around you, through you, despite you — not by your own design but by fiat of universal energies beyond your comprehension.

That’s not to say we can’t shape our lives, or ourselves, through intention and action, only that life was so much vaster than I realized, and my attempts at designing a life so ignorant of so much of life’s depth. I thought, before I became a mother, that life was a matter of doing, and now I know that it is a matter of being. The same is true for selfhood, and motherhood: They are about being in this world, not existing apart from the world and doing things as a proxy for living.

My daughter, Ali, is seven now. When a friend tells me she’s pregnant, I send her a copy of my book, but for a while now, it’s felt like a gesture that’s lacking, because there is so much I want to say that isn’t contained in its pages. I want to say: We talk about “motherhood” as though it’s a singular experience, when in fact, it is as different as the women who embody the role, and…