Planting Dandelions Read Online Free PDF

A few days after I delivered our son while squatting naked on our bedroom floor in front of him and three midwives, he cheerfully ventured to say that he supposed we could now dispense with the need for personal modesty, and ease my strict prohibitions on sharing the bathroom.
    â€œNot on your life,” I growled. “Get out.”

    It’s pretty much impossible to describe the experience of falling in love with your child without sounding like a dope. I once showed up late for a college party where everybody was already tripping on magic mushrooms, and they were all compelled to provide me with running commentary on their altered state, which consisted mainly of profundities like “Wow.” I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I know it’s got to be as tedious to endure someone like me going on about how having children changes—no, really changes —everything.
    I expected to love my baby, of course, but I didn’t know it would be crazy, over-the-moon, in-love love, the kind that turns every song on the radio into a dedication. I wept the first time I heard Aretha Franklin sing “Natural Woman” after I become a mother. My soul, too, must have been in the lost and found, I thought, to feel so redeemed. “Heaven, I’m in heaven,” I crooned, as I danced him cheek to cheek around the house, to Fred Astaire. At nap time I gazed deep into his eyes, and held his little starfish hands, and was love struck. I was the crazy girlfriend who watches her man at night while he sleeps. If my son had had to withstand the full intensity of my adoring focus for the rest of his childhood, it probably would have screwed him up badly, but I was pregnant with his brother the following year.
    The circumstances around that conception were considerably less dramatic than the first—there were no signs that time, unless you consider Saturday-morning cartoons a sign. We considered it an opportunity, and seized it. A few weeks later, the stick displayed the international litmus sign for “Told you so.” Our second son was born two years and four days after our first. How the third got past us, we still aren’t sure, but he arrived the year before the oldest started kindergarten. In a little over five years, I gave birth to three children.
    At my high school reunion, a classmate told me that she’d heard about the first baby, and assumed it happened by accident. She couldn’t believe I’d gone on to have two more. “No offense,” she said, blatantly astonished, “but I never saw you as the maternal type.”
    I laughed, and told her no one was more surprised than than I was. She’d be even more astonished to see me with my kids. In spite of all expectations to the contrary, I am a good mother. Having easygoing children helps. Paradoxically, so do those same low expectations. In a culture that makes impossible demands of mothers, they’ve served to my psychological advantage. I figure I’m doing all right as long as I keep my babies free of mold and bugs. Everything exceeding that standard can be regarded as a personal triumph; success building on success. My boys flourish and thrive, and know they are beloved. If they are occasionally without clean socks, they understand it is a failure of planning, not feeling.
    I still don’t think of myself as “the maternal type.” I like children in general, and love some in particular, but I don’t want to mother any but my own. I don’t beg to hold new babies, like some of my friends do, though I will cheerfully hold my arms out to receive one, if asked. But it doesn’t naturally occur to me to shake baby feet, smell baby heads, or talk baby talk. I was initially taken aback when other women expressed those urges toward my baby. The first time a stranger came up and smelled my son’s head, I thought she was nuts. We were at a party, back in the days when we just had one