The first time I felt like a mother wasn’t when I held him after he was born or the day that we took him home from the hospital. He was far too new to us and every twenty seconds my husband Bob and I would turn to one another and ask, "Doesn’t it feel strange that we now have a baby?"

There is no doubt that we loved him at first sight but at night we would sometimes lie awake listening to his newborn gurgling breathing patterns over the monitor as if we were picking up alien signals.

 I felt like a real mother for the first time when he was five weeks old. It happened after a Gymboree class when the teacher called across the room, "Matthew's mom? You forgot your burp cloth!” I kept walking until I realized she meant me. I was the mother to this darling blue-eyed sleep bandit I held in my arms.

 Most of the time parenting feels like a privilege. I enjoy cooking warm meals, reading board books, giving soapy bubble baths, conversations with tattered stuffed animals, kissing scraped knees, and throwing birthday parties. I can be as enthusiastic of a mother as the pages in a parent magazine.

 I won’t soon forget the reaction of our former neighbors who lived across the hall the first time I nearly plowed him down with our travel system in the narrow shared hallway of our apartment building. 

 “Oh. I saw an empty car seat in Bob’s car a few weeks ago but I wasn’t sure…” his voice trails off he takes in the several Target bags wedged over the handles of the stroller.

 It’s the same reaction I have when someone I know gets a puppy. ‘Oh. I like dogs but they are too much work for me.’

 “Mommy? I’m finished!” Matthew calls from the potty. At four he is capable of taking care of business on his own but still likes to make a production out it. His baby sister, Samantha begins to fuss because her bouncy seat went into sleep mode before she did. This is while I’m trying to sew a homemade Darth Vadar using a pattern out of a book that is due back to the library tomorrow.  Thus far the materials have cost double of what it would cost to buy him one. It’s a personal mission more than a means of love at this point.

 “I’m all done! Mom? Where are you?”

 Samantha’s pacifier falls out of her mouth and she hasn’t quite figured out what arms are for yet. Times such as these are when parenting that feels like a chore.

 There is a rule of thumb that applies to both babies and dogs. Once you get one you seem to notice other ones are everywhere you go. The spring that I had Matthew I saw more parents pushing strollers than ever before. I chatted up strangers with strollers and discovered a whole new appreciation for events and places that catered towards children. I didn’t know that there was a mother’s room at my workplace until I had to figure out where to pump once my maternity leave ended.

 “Mom?” Matthew wants my attention again but I’m busy making a light saber using felt and a pipe cleaner. “Guess what?”

 “What?” I ask more focused on the task at hand than whatever it is that he wants to tell me.

 "Samantha smiled at me like a real person,” he tells me. At once I put the light saber down to watch Samantha grinning up at us from her seat. Her first smile!

 That gummy grin reminds me that as demanding as it is I wouldn’t want to trade motherhood for all the uninterrupted sleep and time to myself in the world.