I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of people who want to talk to me about my baby when I’m in public with him. 90% of them are women around my mother or mother-in-law’s age who tell me that their children aren’t planning to have children or that they only have one grandchild and that grandchild lives two thousand kilometres away. All of them tell me how adorable and precious he is. I already know this, of course, but I love hearing it just the same. There’s also a few men who like to talk to bébé. They say gruff things like “high buddy” or “this year’s model, eh.” Big B finds these conversations amusing. He loves the “aww he’s with daddy” or “he looks just like you” comments he gets when he carries bébé around.
Most of these people and conversations are forgettable and
similar, but a few stick in my brain. The Almond Milk Woman is one of them
You are a good mother, she told me she when we met in the organic aisle in Superstore only a few weeks after Little B was born. We were standing in front of the coolers that held milk alternatives. More specifically we were both reaching for the almond milk. Her words tried to make my hormonal sleepy new mom brain tearful a little, but luckily i realized that Superstore wasn’t the place for that. You are a good mother even when you make mistakes or think you aren’t. Always trust your *mother intuition. You know what is best for your child. And then before she left she said, I usually make my own almond milk, but today I was lazy. Now I know it was because I was meant to speak to you.
No one else has been quite this dramatic or full of advice. None of the others have told me they were meant to speak to [me.] My little judgey heart says that if I hadn’t been wearing my newborn in a linen sling and standing in front of the almond milk display in the natural foods aisle Almond Milk Woman wouldn’t have deemed my level of crunchiness high enough for her to speak to. Nevertheless, I was happy that she did. And, Almond Milk Lady, if you ever happen to read this, please know that, even though I don’t make my own almond milk like you think I should, my sourdough starter was rising on my counter at home as I spoke to you in Superstore and I have since started a kombucha journey.
About mother intuition / parent intuition -I would love to know other parents’ thoughts on this topic. Is it legit ? Not a real thing ? One Mother I trust and love told me something similar not in this exact terminology but still about trusting my mother intuition, since I became a mother. My sissy passed on something she’d read on this topic: a mother’s intuition is right 80% of the time. For intuition being just a feeling, 80 is a high percentage of correctness. Are you a believer in mother / parent / caregiver intuition? Do you have experiences where your intuition has been right? -or wrong ?
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