Becoming real

One day when R was just a few months past three, he looked up at our engagement picture (where it had been hanging on the wall since before he was born), and asked, “Who are those people mommy?”

In just over a month, I will be another year older. Before I had kids, I had approximately 36 bottles, creams, powders, sprays and small electrical appliances that I used to get ready to leave the house on any given day. In my younger years, I scrutinized the evenness of my eye shadow and tried on six different pairs of shoes before leaving the house for a date.

Today, if I discover the spit up trickling down my back, AND have the time to wipe it off before running out the door in the morning, I consider the day a success. Time that I once devoted to primping; I would now rather spend getting extra strawberry-jam-covered kisses while banana goo is unceremoniously wiped in my hair.

After K was born, I noticed that my hair was just a little less shiny (notwithstanding the banana goo), and there were a few more lines around my eyes. During those first months when new mothers sleep less than is even humanly possible, I sported dark circles too. And don’t get me started on what the miracle of life does to everything from the neck down.

Not long ago, R asked me to read the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit to him. In summary, a little boy gets a stuffed rabbit for Christmas, which becomes the boy’s favorite toy, accompanying him through childhood, until the boy loses interest and the rabbit is cast aside. The whole book is told from the rabbit’s perspective. Personally, I’ve always thought it was kind of a depressing story. But, as I was reading it aloud to my four-year-old, I heard my own voice reading these lines:

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

I laid in bed that night thinking about these words. What I decided is that I’m not getting older. I’m just getting more real. Moms aren’t born real. They’re made that way by their children.