thoughts on being a mother #1

So here I sit... my child lies sleeping restlessly in her bassinet beside me... the tinkle of children's sleep music drifts across the room as I condition her to drift off whenever this music is played... she grunts occasionally, a guttural and indelicate but decidedly cute sound, but stays in dream land.
A few minutes ago I held her in my arms in the dim light of my room... and I soothed her... and I gazed at her little face and tried to get my head around the fact that she is my daughter...for life she will be my daughter... this journey that is my life will, from now, be lived as two not a solo flight...
This is a huge change for me...the independent aquarian who is used to being answerable to no-one, doing things "my way"... being impulsive at times, being withdrawn into myself at times, being adventurous as the whim takes me... Now I must always think of her...her needs, her wishes, her goals...
I tried to imagine the moments that lie ahead...the first time she calls me "mummy", the first time I sit in a school hall to watch her in a concert, the moments when I pick her up from school and she runs to me full of stories of her day, the first time she skins her knee or has a bad dream and cries for her mummy...and thousands more... this is now me - my life.
I have imagined it for so long that now that it is here it still feels unreal - like I am still imagining it, dreaming about it... like one day I will wake up and she will not be here and I will realise it was all a day dream that was so vivid it felt real.
I know its real, and I don't know its real... at the same time.
I have been so extremely well supported that I have not had a shock moment of realisation of the hard reality of being a parent...I have been so lucky that it has all seemed easy so far - too easy perhaps... maybe that is why I am taking time to get my head into the reality of it.
And at the same time it feels so natural and like I am doing the thing I was born to do... there has not been a harsh transition into the role of mother... I have just slipped into it like a comfortable old jacket. And so perhaps what I mistake for a sense of unreality is actually more of a sense of comfort in the new reality - perhaps it is the strangeness that is missing...
Only time will tell how my head and heart will deal with what is a fundamental core life change, the realisation of my life's dreams, and at the same time - just simple and beautiful.
:-)