Musings from a 38 year old mamma

This post is really more for the memory book. For the kids to see what mamma was thinking about when they were little.

At Eric’s 9 month well visit, our pediatrician noted that while Olivia developed separation anxiety around 6 months old, it usually pops up around 9/10 months so we should be on the lookout. As he realizes the concept of permanence – i.e. people exist even when they're not physically present in the room – he will want and miss the people he’s become attached to.

Like clock-work, a week or so later, we started noticing that if I left the room, Eric would begin to cry. Like magic, as soon as I walk back in and pick him up, it’s all better. This is a familiar game to us – one that we still play to some extent with Olivia. Just like Olivia, Eric is also attached to his favorite teacher at school – Miss Shatavia. He cries if she leaves the room, if she isn’t there when we arrive in the morning, and if she plays with or holds another baby.

As Matt and I were discussing Eric’s attachment to Miss Shatavia and Olivia’s attachment to her first teacher, Miss Sam, it got me thinking about the term “attachment.” It’s an interesting connotative term – depending on the tone and context, it can have a positive or negative inference. And for me, the entire emotion has at times seemed a little overwhelming. 

I have a very distinct memory of being in college during the beginning phase of dating Matt and walking home from his apartment feeling almost physically overwhelmed by how attached I was to him. And not in a good way - it worried me and made me uncomfortable. I had never really felt that attached to someone before and at 19 years old, I didn’t know what to do with those feelings. Though our relationship took some twists and turns, lucky for me, things turned out okay with my attachment to that guy. 

I never felt those complex feelings again until September of 2011 when Miss O was born. And again, it surprised me and made me uneasy. In those early weeks of being a new mom, I had so many emotions that I felt so strongly that I was again almost physically uncomfortable from them. When she was about a month old, I was talking on the phone to someone I was close to and that person observed that I was “too attached” to Olivia. She meant it in a negative way. I brushed off the comment on the phone, but it stuck with me. I obsessed over it a little and I guess I still do. And after 6 ½ years with my girl, I think she was right. I was/am compulsively, frantically, obsessively, whole-heartedly attached to Olivia. But now, those feelings don’t make me uncomfortable at all. In fact, I hope and pray those strong and faithful feelings never fade. She is just one of my favorite people in the world and I hope she always knows how attached I am to her – that I’m just her biggest fan and will always here to listen, to talk to, to go with her wherever she wants, to cry or laugh with her. To just BE with her. As she gets older and finds her place in this world, I hope that my constant attachment and support of her will be a source of comfort and consistency.

I’ve written before about how my extreme joy with finding out we were pregnant with Eric was tempered with nervousness over whether I would be as attached to him as I was to Olivia. So when those intense and powerful feelings of attachment showed up in the days following his birth, I was relieved and thankful. No longer did they make me uneasy, I now was comfortable in this deep motherly love for my babe. In his 9 months with us, Eric has filled a place in my heart that I hoped he would and bonded with me in a way I longed for. I now wear the moniker of “attached” as a badge of honor.

As I recently celebrated my 38th birthday, I feel happy and lucky to say that I am hopelessly attached to these people (and fortunately for me, I think they return the feeling) and I couldn’t be more contented.