On Point

Shot to a mother’s heart

By: Linda McCarthy
   Over the years, my oldest has done many things to age me.
   From the first day of conception I knew he was going to be a challenge. I was sick everyday, and I think I’m in a medical journal somewhere as the only human to have the same gestation period as an elephant. This probably coincides with the fact that pregnancy also made me look like an elephant.
   After three days of intense labor, I finally got to meet my baby. He was a lot louder than I had anticipated. I figured he would settle down when we got him home; I figured wrong. That first year was tough, but then we got to know each other a little better, and things improved.
   I was a stay at home mom. I know this is a touchy subject with a lot of people, but it was the right decision for me. Of course it meant we were living on a shoestring, but that didn’t matter.
   I didn’t miss his first step, and he never called a babysitter "mama." I never had to get up at some ungodly hour to pack him up and drop him at daycare. When the weather was bad, we stayed in and played hide-and-seek. When the sun was out, we headed to the beach or park. He loved GI Joes, and we played army so often I have enough experience to go on maneuvers. We played on the swings for hours trying to see who could go the highest.
   The time I spent with him flew by so quickly. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a minute.
   It would take volumes to write about the school years. Some days were good, some days…not so much. When I was a kid, I would run home from school and play school. So I couldn’t understand why I had to muster the strength of three burly men to drag my son there. Eventually, he figured out he had to go and settled into a routine, one that included a call home from the school for one thing or another. This was new to me, but my husband has eight brothers and assured me this was standard procedure for boys.
   I felt gray hairs sprouting on my head when he got his first job, went to his first dance and got his driver’s license.
   But last week he did something that has me staring at a retirement home. He got engaged.
   How is this possible? I’m too young to be a mother-in-law. Not that everything is all about me, but what’s next? Grandchildren? Break out the hair dye; I feel some more grays popping.
   You can’t fight the ravages of time. But shifting focus back to the happy couple…his fiancée is a lovely girl, and I look at her as the daughter I always wanted but never had. She makes him very happy and that’s all a mother could wish for…except maybe a few more minutes with my baby on the swings.

Linda McCarthy resides in Robbinsville with her husband and three children.