Becoming the Mother of an Adult or Coping with Being Half Baked

Becoming the Mother of an Adult or Coping with Being Half Baked

I tried to make chocolate cupcakes today. I failed. Our first-born turns 18 tomorrow and the previous few weeks have thrown me into a bout of soul searching and a general feeling of dismay that I am on the precipice of becoming a mother of an adult. Late this afternoon I remembered a suggestion I had read once that advised a potentially laboring woman to bake a chocolate cake from scratch and supposedly by the time the cake was baked, cooled and frosted the woman would be ready to birth her baby. I thought what better way to not only celebrate our daughter’s birthday but also to create a ritual to birth myself into this next stage of parenting. I began to rummage through the cabinets to determine if I had the necessary ingredients. For some reason my desire to bake blinded me to the fact that I lacked what I needed to actually, well, bake!

This lack of preparedness and blind determination has actually served me well these last 18 years. Despite the warnings that my baby might, “catch the death of cold” because she wasn’t wearing socks in June in Phoenix, the angry woman who insisted I was abusing my child because I took her to a college football game after she received vaccinations, the advice from my fellow play group mom friends who frantically insisted that we not nurse for too long or co-sleep at all because of course the child will never wean or sleep on their own and my favorite of all, the admonishments from friends and strangers that the absolute worst thing I could do was to hold my baby too much lest she become, “too dependent,” I somehow managed to get here; a mother of an adult. Although society’s recipe called for all the things I didn’t have or rather refused to add to my own parenting recipe I have been able to fully bake an independent, healthy, smart, beautiful, compassionate human who is ready to be launched into this world and the world will be a better place because of her. 

Our daughter might be fully baked but the cupcakes, like my role as a parent are only half-baked. As I enter into this next phase of mothering I realize that each stage is new especially with the first-born and that as I grow I will need to rely again on my own recipe (mixed with some sage advice) to move through the stages that are to come. It will be interesting to hear what the societal peanut gallery will dole out to me next. But as they say, the proof is in the pudding, uh hum…cupcake?