Moodswing - You just know

Yesterday two mothers mistook me for one of them. We were at San Francisco Coffee Roasters admiring each others’ babies when they asked me, “Why don’t you join us?” Caught off guard, I sputtered something about an impending deadline and scurried away with my baby in tow. I was afraid these two capable women would learn the sordid secret I’ve kept for the past six months. “Those girls are moms,” I thought as I shuffled off. “I’m not a mom, I just play one in real life.”In short, I’m totally unprepared for this role. From the beginning, this kid came like a comet out of nowhere. Chris and I still don’t know how — other than all that acrobatic sex — she happened, considering all the barriers in place to prevent it. My theory is that my uterus had an out-of-body experience one night, I mean it literally crawled out of my body while we were sleeping and latched itself onto my boyfriend like a big fertile squid. After that there was no going back.
And I was petrified. Me? A mother? My own mother provided a gleefully pitiful point of reference for motherhood. Her idea of a holiday dinner was to serve Slim Jims with the wrappers off, and for breakfast she would sometimes leave us a big bowl of Halloween candy before heading to work. With my childhood diet, I’m surprised I didn’t grow a tumor the size of a Siamese twin. My mother died 10 years (almost to the day) before my daughter was born, and her last words were used to request a cigarette. I remember when I was 7 I told her I had a crush on Satan because I’d seen his picture in the Children’s Bible and I thought he looked hot with his hair like Lyle Wagner. She looked at me through the smoke of her Salem Menthol and said, “Kid, he’s not the man for you.”
“How do you know?”
“You just know.”
Every day I’m afraid I’ll accidentally somehow set my child on fire or something, and an afternoon doesn’t go by without me wondering how mankind hasn’t completely perished, considering cribs were unregulated in the caveman days. My own family drove across the country, twice, in an old Ford Fairlane with no seatbelts. The worst that happened is that my father ran over a lady’s foot. But he said she deserved it.
So looking back I’m surprised I survived. My mother was one of the first women in the country to achieve top security clearance by the government to work on weapons projects involving missiles. She rarely talked about her job because it was, quite literally, secret. So I grew up never knowing how it set me apart, to be the only one among my friends whose mother made bombs. I consider this wholly to her tribute, but it also put her in the habit of limiting her explanations to the barest denominator. When she got sick she was characteristically resolute about her illness:
“How do you know the cancer has spread to your liver?”
“You just know.”
Anyway, awash like I am in this litany of worries about my daughter, I wish I could ask my mother if she felt the same way about me. Did she ache to shield me from the big ball of shit that life can be? Did she know she’d have to leave me to be hurt and hardened and, at times, unloved by people I sought love from? That through all this my soul would shut down only to grow again, painfully, like blood returning to a limb on the wrong end of a tourniquet? Did she know that the day would come in which I would be OK? That I’d look around and realize how happiness kind of crept up on me, and now maybe I can let my breath out only I can’t because I have my own daughter now and I need to make sure she’s going to be OK, too. How do I do that? How do I know my daughter will be all right? Please tell me how.
I can almost smell my mother’s cigarette as her words come back to me. “You just know,” she says.