Skydiving Souvenir (or, Becoming A Mother)

Becoming a mother is like being dropped from a small aircraft into the ocean from 12000 feet. You prepare for it by putting on a parachute and a life jacket, but when you hold up your ticket with two pink lines, board the plane and take off, you're struck with horrible air sickness. What were you thinking? Then the plane hits some altitude and you cruise for a while enjoying the ride. But fear strikes again as you near the point of departure. That first leap - the squeezing tightness in your belly - there's no turning back. You get a surge of adrenaline and fear and joy and craziness. When the parachute opens you begin to enjoy the ride down. But not for long. You begin to spin, to flail, to realize how quickly the ocean is approaching, and with great pain you and the ocean collide. You take a gasp of air and hold your breath. This is it, the moment of becoming. Push through! Under the water you are rolled and swayed dizzy. Your arms find a soft object and hug it close. Finally you struggle to the surface where you realize, for the first time, that the life jacket you carefully packed along does not fit you at all but it's just the perfect size for the seven-pound person you found there under the ocean and dragged with you up to the wave-tossed top.

And there you are, treading water in the middle of a vast sea. It's very disorienting, the constant buffeting of the waves, endless straining, incessant protection of that precious gift you hold. But in time, as days and weeks pass, you find you are able to swim with increasing skill, guard with greater confidence, and navigate with clearer direction. Eventually your feet find solid ground and you emerge bedraggled on the shore. Gazing down again at the perfect souvenir of your skydiving adventure cradled carefully in your arms, you know it was worth it, and you will never be the same.

On Mother's Day, visit Get Born Magazine at www.getbornmag.com for a special message from editor Heather Janssen AND to be entered for great prizes!

Zero To One

My husband used to ask our child-blessed friends which was harder, going from one to two or two to three. I always wanted three. The general consensus was that once you have two, adding more was easy.

I had sailed through college, worked several years including two abroad, entered grad school and married soon after, all along nurturing a horde of hobbies: photography, guitar, hiking, Japanese, on went the list. I held onto my dream in the face of infertility and when I defended my master's thesis eight months pregnant, life was good.

True, I did not like holding, smelling, hearing, or even looking at babies. "It'll be different when it's your own," I'd been told. But countless hours spent in my blue rocking chair, bedroom door shut, weepy eyes studying a tiny suckling infant, heart aching desperately to love her with a fierce maternal bond did not make it so. I was a babysitter and not even a good one.

I lost myself in those postpartum months. Yet in the dark cocoon of depression I was being forever transformed. When at last I spread my wings to soar, I found joy and freedom and beauty in the flight. I discovered the height of a mother's love. I became a mom.

My third child was born this year, and I am happy. My whiteboard pen has been replaced by a feeding spoon, book pages by baby wipes, guitar picking fingers plucking cheerios from linoleum. Though at times I cast a wistful glance at the box of watercolors or the shelf of gourmet cookbooks, I am content to stash them away for a season of life that has redefined me. And I know that if I am ever asked whether it's harder going from one to two or two to three, I will have to say that my greatest challenge was going from zero to one.

Kristina Lim