You Know You're a Mom When...

I was reading a magazine the other day and there was a Mother's Day article in it. In the article, various women were talking about when it dawned on them that they were actually mothers. Some of them were silly little anecdotes, some were women fighting to get their adopted children home or to get their sick children medical attention.

Although I have two kids, and the oldest has been around for almost three years now, a lot of days I feel like I'm still playing dress up. In my heart I know I'm a mom and I certainly care for my children all day, every day. But I still don't always feel like a mom. And I'm not even entirely sure how a mom's supposed to feel.

When I was little, I looked at my mom and all the other moms and I knew they were moms. They took care of us, made lunches, took us to school, washed our clothes, put our band aids on, filled the swimming pools, gave us our baths, took us to the playground... You name it, the moms did it. And I never questioned who the moms were or what they did.

Now that I am a mom, I look at other moms and I see the moms I saw when I was little. And I'm doing the same things the other moms do, more or less. But I don't know that other women look at me and think, "Now, there's a mom."

I do, however, have the occasional "Mom moment". I had one just the other day at Target. I had just walked into the store with my little ones tagging along behind me. A young couple had walked in just before us and they had a teeny tiny baby in a car seat. They looked like they literally had come from the hospital - that's how small the baby was.

Well, this couple was struggling with how to place their car-seated infant into the cart. Having done this about a billion times in the past couple years, I instantly went into action. I walked right over to the new mom and dad, showed them how to set the seat on the cart push bar, and told them they could just put the car seat right into the cart itself if they preferred. They looked so relieved it made me smile.

As I walked away, I thought, "Hmm...that was definitely a Mom moment. Maybe I really am one after all?!"