This Is What It Feels Like

Alice bumped her head for the first time the other day. She was sitting up and toppled suddenly to the side in that clumsy way that babies do. As she fell, she conked her head on her father's knee. Her eyes went blank with surprise at first, and she squinched up her face and wailed, huge tears rolling down her cheeks.


I picked her up and propped her on my hip and shushed her, and she immediately curled her legs around me and laid her head against my chest, and I was filled with this gigantic feeling of fullness, a buzzy, squeezy feeling in my heart and in my gut that I couldn't quite identify. It wasn't until I pressed my lips to the top of her head that it occurred to me:


This is what it feels like to be a mom.