The Mommy Badge.

The best way I can think of to explain to you guys my life the past few months is to kind of, I guess, let the story unfold for you instead of trying to tell it chronologically. I'm not ready for that kind of rehashing just yet.

This is a post I wanted to write before everything happened. I no longer can remember what inspired it, but the sentiment was truly driven home during the beginning of everything, and I feel the need to share it a million fold now.

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There's a kind of nakedness that comes with mommyhood that you don't expect until you feel it. Perhaps I was less aware it could effect me since the first eight days of my son's life he was relegated to a single sterile room, where I often had to leave him in the care of strangers for stretches of time, and often had to watch as so many people handled and inspected him while I stood by, helplessly. I had to get permission from endless medical professionals in order to fully become his mother without a nurse standing by. Hell, it took me until his third day of life to realize I could even touch him if I wanted to, without a nurse handing him to me. God, that moment was so -- relieving, freeing almost -- when I looked at my crying son in his isolette and realized, I'm his mother. I can hold him if I want to and so I pushed the bilirubin lights away and picked up my son for the first time, held him close to me, and felt his sobs stop on contact. That was my first real taste of motherhood, of that feeling that no matter what, at the end of the day, that little boy belonged to me. Even so, I had to wait to take him home, to make him mine.

Once he was home I could barely stand to be apart from him. Although, it wasn't in a clingy, pointless way, but more of that fear of something going terribly wrong if I turned my head for just a minute, if I didn't pay close enough attention he's be back in the NICU quicker than I could call 911. I'd lose him again to those machines and specialists and his own irregular heartbeat.

And I felt that slowly over time, I was doing well with separation. After six weeks, I was ready for him to stop sleeping in our room and to start sleeping in his nursery. I was comfortable leaving him in the care of my mother for a few hours, or under the watchful eye of a visiting friend while I grabbed a quick shower, or even leaving him in my husband's charge for an evening out with my friends.

It was that first time we tried to go on a date and we left him at my mom's -- not for an overnight, but just for a few hours -- that it began to hit me.

I was missing my mommy badge -- and a piece of myself.

There was nothing screaming out for the world that I was a mom. No evidence that I had spent the greater part of a year creating life inside my poor, poor belly. Nothing to show for such a tumultuous experience, for the difficult medical diagnoses, for the hours and days and months spent in worry and anticipation. To the naked, untrained, unknowing eye, there was nothing remarkable about me in any way, although I had recently undergone the most remarkable transformation ever to happen to a woman.

My family was incomplete in public. And I felt incomplete without my child. I interrupted our date so that we could go see our son, and by fate we ended up showing up right as my mom was putting him down for bed. His face lit up and he began pumping his arms -- as was his way of expressing excitement before he mastered smiling -- upon seeing us. We were able to kiss and cuddle him goodnight and continue on our date, I think both mother and son feeling much better for the quick check-in. Reflection made me realize that our child had already been a physical part of me for roughly a year at that point, and to have him on the outside, out of eyesight and arm's reach, was harder than I ever could have imagined. We were intrinsically connected forever -- blood of my blood and bone of my bone -- pieces of each other for now and for always, and to try to distance that caused me actual physical discomfort.

Things like going to the grocery store were different now -- with my infant I could peruse through the aisles, wearing my new parental title with both beaming pride and true humility. But without him, I felt like I was naked, trying to pretend it was completely normal to grocery shop in my birthday suit. With him, I was A Mom. Without him, I was just a overweight girl. I would make cracks about finding spit up on my shirt or walking around with a burp cloth still draped on my shoulder or a pacifier in my pocket -- It's my Mommy Badge, I'd say jokingly. It's how people know I'm an official Mom, ready with a band-aid and a kiss for any boo-boo, anytime, anywhere. But the truth was they were markers that I was more than what met the eye, for perhaps the first time in my life -- I was truly more than what I appeared to be.

And he, he was my Purpose For Being, even on days I didn't feel like being at all.

So when I lost him for that horrible week in September, when completely untrue things were said about me in a court of law by someone I trusted very deeply, it cut my soul to shreds. The first night I spent away from my son since bringing him home from the hospital was due to a court order. The night he had his first fever I couldn't mother him because he wasn't with me -- I had to kiss him goodnight and try not to let my absolute heartbreak show as I prayed he'd be better by morning, and leave him. And for a time during those lost months, every other weekend I had to say goodbye to a part of me and watch him be taken away, knowing those were days and memories I was never going to get back, his life permanently missed by me, the one person who whom his care had been pretty much solely entrusted until that point.

I couldn't drive my own car because the sight of the car seat base in the backseat brought me to tears. I slept with one of his blankets that smelled like him. Things like going to the grocery store made me physically ill. There was just a refrain in my mind: This isn't right, this isn't how it's supposed to be, you're his mother, he's your son over and over ad nauseum, at times bringing me to the point of dry heaving.

And I can't even talk about the few times I made it out in public and I saw another mother with her infant child.

So now, now that things are have been getting and are continuing to be better and things like custody arrangements and ex parte hearings bear no weight with us anymore, I've even more appreciative of the time I spend with my son, of the memories I get to be a part of with him. I'm more excited than ever to take him to the grocery store, and not awkwardly shy when people comment on how little he is or when they melt upon seeing his big two-toothed smile and his big, purposeful bat of his extra-long and extra-curly eyelashes. (And yes, those are a gift from Mama as well, Monkey; you'll thank me later.) I'm excited now more than ever to take him places and have new experiences with him -- a pumpkin patch, Mommy & Me yoga class, the Air Force Museum, the park -- because I know now that not just a medical condition has the potential to separate us.

Every moment is precious, a gift never to be taken for granted because in a bat of big beautiful eyelashes -- whether it be by an ambulance, by a police officer, or by a piece of paper -- it can be taken without explanation, without remorse, and possibly without any room for improvement or resolution.

I am so very lucky to have my son smile at me every time he wakes up, to be able to hold him and kiss him whenever I please, and to even be teaching him the meaning of "no" and to subsequently weather his newly-found temper.

I am the luckiest woman in the world, and now more than ever, I can wear my Mommy Badge proudly -- and humbly.