......how quickly, after having a child of your own, you become your mother.......

I distinctly remember, at about age 12 or 13, waking up in the middle of the night to find my mother standing over me, feeling for a pulse in my neck.

Yes, indeed.

You see, it's really quite logical. She was afraid I was dead.

I had been battling a chronic case of bronchitis for awhile and pretty much coughing my head off each and every night. So my mom had taken me back to the Dr yet again to get a different medication. And this one had actually worked. My coughing stopped and I was finally and at long last enjoying a good nights sleep, not to mention letting everyone else sleep. But my mom, instead of praising God for the much needed relief and enjoying it herself, chose to believe that I had not gotten better from the new medication but had in fact died.

Thus the paranoid checking of my pulse at 2 a.m.

I decided then and there that my mom was a bit nutty. But little did I know that my rash judgement of her, not to mention the whole coughing all night situation, would come back to haunt me years later.

Fast forward through marriage, pregnancy and the birth of my own daughter, E.

E has had a cough for about a week now. Just at night. She sleeps through it. But I do not. I lie awake listening to her and praying there was something I could do and some way for her to get a little relief.

Well, last night she rounded a corner and in what I've taken to (hopefully) mean she is getting better, she didn't cough for several hours. In a row.

But me?

Instead of sleeping, instead of relaxing and enjoying the quiet, instead of slipping off the heavy garment of worry I've been wearing for a week, I was convinced she had died.

Flash back to my own childhood. Flash back to my own mom.

Wow.

I realized I have officially come full circle in my life.

I did not go in and check for my daughter's pulse; that urge I was able to resist. But I did completely understand what feelings and emotions and deep, deep love had prompted my mom to check for mine so long ago. And I realized it was not nutty at all. It was, and is, what being a mom is all about.