One Look Was All It Took

As we enter the month of Thanksgiving, I have been reflecting on events that have changed the course of my life. I was recently listening to the song “This by Darius Rucker. He sings about “every stoplight I didn't make, every chance I did or I didn't take,” all those things that could have happened but didn’t led him to where he is today. And he wouldn’t change a thing. That’s how I’ve been feeling.

Kids? Not me. Not ever. That was the theme by which I lived all through undergraduate school. I was going to be an attorney. If I chose marriage, it might slow me down, and I could really put career advancement in jeopardy if kids were to become a part of the picture. At least that was my thinking as a young college woman, and even as a young married woman.

However, when I was lying in the hospital after my daughter was born, law school never crossed my mind. For years I had set my goal as a career in corporate law. But looking into my daughter’s eyes as I held her in that hospital bed, I knew that I could not let anyone else take care of her. She wasn’t planned, but I was so grateful that she had shown up. And so, as I lay there in the hospital, I began to prepare for my new career as a stay-at-home mom.

My college advisor had told me after graduation to go out into the world and to be the best that I could be at whatever I chose. Now here I was choosing my daughter. I would spend my days playing with her and nurturing her.

When she was eighteen months old, we attended a local community theater production of “The Wizard of Oz.” We took classes together. We read together. And as she grew up, we were involved in theatrical productions together. Singing and dancing were also something we shared. I loved it when friends referred to us as the Jarman sisters. We shopped together, laughed together and spent lots of time together. Even though there were those times during puberty when I feared which demon would possess her when she woke, she was mine. And I loved being her mother.

I spent thirteen years as a stay-at-home mom raising my daughter and son (yes, he came along three and a half years after she arrived). I can’t even begin to imagine myself in a courtroom. The gaze into that baby’s eyes changed my life forever, and I couldn’t be more thankful.