Am I a Mom?

Sometimes I forget that I have a daughter. Like now. 

I just looked out the window from my fiercely focused 'free' time while she naps, two hours of catching up on bills, emails, Twitter, calendar planning... and I remembered that at any moment, her little head will pop out of the bedroom and I'll drop everything with a smile exploding out of my face, to greet her. It is as if I had forgotten, ever focused in Efficient Mom Mode, that I indeed do have a daughter. 

Years ago, before she came around, my mother friends would tell me how efficient they'd become. An hour as a mother was like 5 hours as a non-mother, they would say. Fueled by a super-focused fire, they could accomplish things almost miraculously, compared to when they didn't have a child of their own.

Forgetting I've got a daughter is kind of crazy given how much of my mind and life she occupies. What's meaningful about it for me is that the presence of children -- their ability to naturally be in the moment of now -- so strikingly captures our admiration, and I guess it's refreshing to think I sometimes enter that nowness too.  

It is also a gift in that, while all the 'me-time' is exceptionally welcome and necessary for my grounded state of mind, I am elated when I see that girl. As long as she sleeps for at least an hour. (Wink wink.)

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