Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

I have to say quickly, thanks everyone for the Skype, iMessage and Whatsapp messages and the Facebook broadcast wishing Happy Mothers Day,  I promise I will bear it in mind when the French celebrate Mothers Day in 2 weeks. Only the French could throw the proverbial spanner in  the works and destroy my peace….

So while today I am not in the limelight (am I ever?) I have to give thanks to the little girlies for being the little part of who I am that makes me a Mom.

My darling Alexandria Faith was born 6 years ago on a mild South African Autumn morning and is such a gentle tender soul.

She kept me awake for a large part of her first 9 months in our lives.  Many a winter night I was nudged awake by Anton, only to realise Alex and I had both fallen asleep while I was feeding her-she and I shared many happy snores with me sitting upright in our bed, and she snuggled cosy near my bare chest.

While we had to inevitibly send her off to day care, Sprokieland looked after her like she was their own.  It might have taken me a long time to realise this, because many a late afternoon I collected her after 4, only to find her lying in a baby chair, looking particularly sad, that I had serious thoughts to the necessity of a dual income household.  But given time, I was shown that we had a wonderful group of ladies helping to raise our children.

When she was 3, the start of a more routined day care, she was under the care of a wonderful lady who spotted Alex’s need to connect- with another solitary English speaking girl in her class.  Its been 3 years, and my Alex still talks with much admiration for her darling friend, who we Skype once a month, and whom Alex will still always remember in her imaginary play, asking me when her friend will come visit, always inserting (an ancestral) German flag in my messages to her Mom.

In 10 months, Alex has not complained once about being away from SA. She has cried to herself occasionally, citing the fact that she misses R, but she has embraced her French adaptation like the corageous little soldier I know she is.

She has fixated on the need to learn the language,so that she is not left out in the class or in the playground.  And let me tell you, she has a very good understanding. I had to spell a sentence out to her this evening while she was punching out a message on my phone.  While she recognises alphabet letters, she cannot spell (just yet), but the fact that I had to express the letters in French just blew my mind.  (It’s also nice to know that I CAN spell them for her in French)

I have two fears in my life if I consider Alexs’ future:  Will she rebel at such an oblique angle that even I will not recoginse her (and I did rebel, away from the gaze of those nearest and dearest, so I have an idea), or  will she be the victim of bullies and not able to stand up to herself when her ‘friends’ turn their  backs on her?  While I would love her to be a book nerd, a subtle politic-knowledged conversationalist who can talk sport and book reviews, I would also love for her to cultivate the passion that I believe is in her soul.

Speaking of passion (I think we believe all our children have a deep seated passion), my Elizabeth Hope is full of it.

For whatever reasons, we thought it would take longer to fall pregnant the second time round, but 6 weeks after Christmas, 2009, I was pregnant, putting a bit of a concern on the fact that I was in the path for job  transfers.  But I was blessed with fabulous nausea for dirty cooking oil and  mutton.  Morning sickness was not my friend (in my opinion).

So Beth was scheduled to be ceasereaned out on my birthday, 2010.   Anton took me out for early breakast with bubbles, and a quick visit to Woolworths to buy myself a new post-pregnancy bikini.

A c-sec the second time round at the age of 33 took me a day or 2 extra to recover, and the fear of watching nurses trying to find veins to draw blood to test for jaundice will never leave me, but nothing prepares you more for motherhood than actual motherhood, and by the time I returned to the work furnace after 4 months, Beth was mostly sleeping through-and not in any way  attached to my skin as with her sister.

She settled at day-care with much more ease, and very soon was fighting off her class mates as she she had been taught by the class bully- a boy who had a reputation for biting.

Beth was slow to start talking- probably due to the bilingual nature of her habitat. Strangely, the week before we jetted out to France, I was able to listen to her talking to Anton’s parents, and she was pretty fluent in her Afrikaans. Sadly, she has stopped her Afrikaans chat, although she speaks just as little French, and I’m sure she will come round.

But my Beth is one tough cookie.

She has a determined streak in her. In alot of our fights, I come off second best, mostly because she’s prone to not listening, and Alex mostly ends up getting sat on, farted on, her hair pulled, with fingers in her nose, mouth and eyes.

While she adores her dad, she does at least fear him if threatened with his wrath, and my Beth can most certainly turn on the charm when it suits her. My friends turn to goo in the face her curly hair,her twinkling eyes, her smart, cheeky smile.  She is clever, and never misses a trick, a compromise or a promise.  Often I am caught out late into the evening with having to give into ice-cream bribes handed out en route to school.

I see Beth fighting tooth and nail, in some corporate set-up when she grows up, and while I hope it will be litigation, I suspect she will be a lazy scholar like me (great Scorpio’s an so on) and will probably not fulfill my plans for her.

However, regardless of who they are, and what I want them to become, being a Mom is still about the here and now.

Hugs and kisses I receive in abundance.  I also have tantrums and sulks. I don’t always get what I want, they don’t always get what they want.  But I am their mom, and they are my little babies.

We will do what we have to to protect them, for now and forever.

Thank You for the eternal blessings you shower upon us.  We have recieved love from above, and we can only do our best to share the blessings onto our little protogeés.

Thanks also to our darlings Mum’s who have brought us here.  Without you in our lives, we would not have those beautiful, adoring smiles every morning, those eyes that twinkle like little stars, the endearing questions that make our stomachs turn, our hearts smile.

To our darling Alex and Beth, don’t change one little iota.  We love you, now, until to eternity.