MUM STORIES: Even a childless woman is a mother, too

There are those children that take nine months to show up. Others just show up unexpectedly and make you reach deep into your previously unused motherhood instincts. Take me, for instance. When my colleague asked me to write a piece on motherhood, I wondered what I would talk about, seeing as I do not have children

Well, I am a mother, just to other people’s children.

They should call me mother or “aunt” but the relationship is so casual they refer to me by my first name.

MEAN ONLINE COMMENTS

Yet, women like me have found ourselves on the receiving end of sometimes very mean comments online.

I have been asked to refrain from commenting on the well-being of children by women who have carried a pregnancy to term and given birth.

One time, I posted on my Facebook wall about why mothers need to tread carefully on the issue of vaccinations and put the lives of their children first.

A woman I knew in person, a mother of three, asked me, “Na wewe utazaa lini?” (When will you give birth?”). I have seen women pilloried with unprintable names for asking another woman, “Why are you treating your child like that?”

The notion that childless women lose the legitimacy to talk about parenting couldn’t have been further from the truth.

It is like saying they are not allowed to feel what they feel for these children.

NATURAL BIRTH VS C-SECTION

It even gets more absurd when the women who have “pushed” feel that those who had a cesarean section as less of mothers.

I don’t know what I will become when I carry a pregnancy to term, but I do know that whenever my children look at me, the first instinct I feel is rushing there to protect them.

I always feel that there would never be a time when I would not answer when they call as long as I am alive.

I sense their trust and total dependency whenever they complain that they were forced to do something in school… you know, like I am capable of bending the school rules just to accommodate them.

While, naturally, I am really quick to speak my mind whenever I am upset by others, they are capable of making me rethink what I am just about to say.

CAN’T PUT IN WORDS

That is a miracle. There are other emotions that they evoke in me that I cannot put in words. Sometimes, those emotions drive me to be afraid for them or be happy and occasionally cry.

In other words, even though I did not participate in making them, they make me feel things that no other person is able to awaken.

Those emotions are not expressed in as vacuum. They are just as raw and equally intense.

I don’t deny that there must be a special attachment that pregnancy brings to a woman and her child.

Children need you to show up, and it doesn’t take nine months to have that capability.