Motherhood - The Gallery

This week, I didn't think I was going to do The Gallery - I'm doing this so late, I'm almost wondering why I'm posting. The theme is Motherhood - emotive, precious and guaranteed to whirl up a maelstrom of emotions. I looked through the photo archives - there are so many photographs of my boy, but not so many of my boy and me. I remember sobbing on Friend from Way Back's shoulder a few years ago as I lamented the lack of photographs of me and O in his babyhood. I was too tired, too fraught, too caught in the headlights to want to be in photographs when he was tiny. And now I wish I'd just said 'sod it' and poked my weary face into the pictures a little more.


There is one photograph that I love and to me represents that early motherhood. It's of me breastfeeding O and he's got his little hands clasped together in front of him as he feeds. It's a tender moment captured forever and given what happened to the breast he's feeding from a few years later, it is all the more important and poignant. I don't have a digital version of this picture - it's a real live photograph, taken with M's old Olympus SLR. I've taken a pic from my phone of it. Look at those little hands (please try not to focus on the mammoth bosoms)

That was early motherhood - the whole time seems tied up with wild and crazy see-saw emotions for me. I loved my baby, but I was a bit of a state and seemed to sleepwalk through the first two years of his life. Much as I love this photo, it is not the one I want to represent my motherhood.

I am much more with it now that I am the mother of one soon-to-be-six-year-old. I often look at this bouncy, funny, stroppy, dreamy, intelligent and beautiful boy and wonder if it is possible that I will ever be able to tell him how much he means to me and how my whole self aches with the intensity of my love for him. This is my entry for Motherhood - this picture of this fabulous boy. He is comical and cheeky, but lately sometimes so brave and wise and caring beyond his years when his mummy's struggling to keep the difficult stuff from breaking through. I love him more than he will ever know - he is my gorgeous boy, my only child and his happy face in this photograph makes me smile and reminds me how lucky I am to be his mum...