-Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (on being pregnant)
My daughters are little pieces of me. Physical, miniature beings that were created inside my body, and that I delivered to their new home on earth. While on vacation recently with childless friends, I was attempting to describe how it felt to have them so far away, and why I had to keep looking at pictures and talking about my girls. I told them it is different than anything else that I've ever felt proud of in my life - my education or my career for instance, because these are little humans that walk and talk that didn't exist before they grew in my womb.
But it's much more than that. People tell me all the time how much my daughters resemble me. Of course they do - that's how it works! But each and every time I hear those words, I feel a swell of pride that only reinforces the instinctual bond between mother and child.
(Is this perpetual cloning the naked, underlying reason for the continuation of the human race?)
Children come in all shapes, colors and sizes and they are all precious, innocent and deserving of love, but what makes my heart melt at the first sight after a long day of my two young mini-me replicas standing eagerly at the garage door?
Is it their affinity to my own features - the blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin? Or the curiosity of their differences from me? Their autonomous psyches, the ringlet curls, their upturned button noses?
My daughters are little pieces of me. Physical, miniature beings that were created inside my body, and that I delivered to their new home on earth. While on vacation recently with childless friends, I was attempting to describe how it felt to have them so far away, and why I had to keep looking at pictures and talking about my girls. I told them it is different than anything else that I've ever felt proud of in my life - my education or my career for instance, because these are little humans that walk and talk that didn't exist before they grew in my womb.
But it's much more than that. People tell me all the time how much my daughters resemble me. Of course they do - that's how it works! But each and every time I hear those words, I feel a swell of pride that only reinforces the instinctual bond between mother and child.
(Is this perpetual cloning the naked, underlying reason for the continuation of the human race?)
Children come in all shapes, colors and sizes and they are all precious, innocent and deserving of love, but what makes my heart melt at the first sight after a long day of my two young mini-me replicas standing eagerly at the garage door?
Is it their affinity to my own features - the blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin? Or the curiosity of their differences from me? Their autonomous psyches, the ringlet curls, their upturned button noses?
It must be both. They are so different from me, yet so similar. And that makes them irresistible.
Me Jaeda
Me Tristyn
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