on motherhood

I am a mother. I may not be a mother in the way that some of you are, but I am a mother nonetheless. I did not give birth to the furry creatures that sleep in my bed, one on my king-sized pillow and the other to my right with a calico tail smacking my face, but they are my children.

And as a mother, I know I’m supposed to find all that they do adorable. And I used to. Like Bug’s ability to talk, to make the noise of pigeons, only more substantial and with considerably more fervor. I call it his trilling, and he once reserved its use for important moments, like getting my attention so I’d help him up on the windowsill, or to save me from stepping into the feline-forbidden stream of water behind the glass doors in the bathroom, or to tell me precisely where it was that Timmy fell into the well.

But now my dear child uses his words much more often than mommy would like. At 5 am, when he trills incessantly until I wake up, wanting that teaspoonful of kibble that will apparently fill his miniature stomach until he eats again in 20 minutes. Or when repeated attempts at opening a cabinet door sadly fail, and he needs help opening said door to reveal a very important whole lot of nothing on which he will promptly turn his back and resume the licking of obscene body parts.

As a mother, I must ask: how often is it that you want to lock your beloved little ones in a closet? Or put them in a pillowcase? Or repeatedly blow on their ears when they are trying to sleep just because you know that they hate it?

Or maybe this just means I really am a mother.