How Can Someone So Small Make Me Feel So Big?

Before you could see your baby, or touch her, it was love. She was in your dreams even before she had said her first words. When all she did was breastfeed and sleep, she was already the most beautiful and perfect creature on earth. How can someone so small and fragile make us feel so enormous?

It is, without a doubt, one of the biggest mysteries of parenthood. And there is no word for the answer to that question. No book on parenting gives us a satisfactory explanation.

Even when we do not carry the child ourselves, but they enter our lives through adoption, we love them with the same intensity. Even if they do not carry our genetic code, we love our children because they are ours. They are children born from our hearts, and that is something that adoptive parents understand incredibly well.

Of course, there are always those who want to remind us of the scientific explanation for this explosion of emotions, dreams and even anxiety. They are a natural result of a series of biological processes controlled by the substance oxytocin, the hormone of motherhood. This hormone prepares us to respond to the needs of the newborn baby.

But it is not enough to try to explain it only with simple biology. We love our children as naturally as we breathe. 

They are a part of us, an extension of our hearts, and there is an invisible umbilical cord that binds us together for the rest of our lives. For us, our children are the image of perfection, the center of the universe, individuals we will always care for and respect.

To hold a new life in their arms

The magical, unbreakable and fundamental bond between a newborn child and his parents is often ignored in environments designed for motherhood. We forget that it takes two to bring a child into the world.

Unfortunately, we have a tendency to forget the deep feelings that men also have for their newborn sons and daughters from seeing them for the first time. It is an unforgettable and unique moment for the father as well.

What we feel is also a product of our own history

Having children is the result of a process that characterizes and identifies us. When a woman is in the delivery room, she goes through one of the most special moments in her life. Everything that leads to it also forms a unique heritage. These experiences define the mother, the father and, later, the child himself.

• It is very possible that the  parents have had problems having children. Their feelings about the upcoming baby are therefore something very intense, overwhelming and meaningful.
• At the same time , many “rainbow children” are born every day, ie. of parents who have previously gone through a miscarriage, a stillborn child or lost a child. They carry the loss of a previous child in their hearts, someone they will always remember with love. It makes them experience a new birth in a different and even more intense way.

• A premature birth is something else that has a big influence on parents’ experience of the baby’s arrival. Fear, overwhelming emotions and pain characterize the period while the tiny baby fights for his life. Parents of premature babies go through very complex emotional fluctuations, where fear and hope dance together in their hearts.

So small, yet I felt your light within me

Pregnant mothers can sometimes feel fetal movements as early as the 7th or 8th week of pregnancy.

When the mother feels the fluttering movement of her unborn child, everything changes, something starts inside. New emotions begin to emerge.

It is the moment in which she becomes fully aware that she is carrying a life within herself. Almost without us noticing it, a strong, endless and immeasurable love takes over us in a way we can not control.

And we let this love flow and transport us. As the weeks and months go by, this flutter becomes stronger. We dream of our child’s face and imagine her voice, her smile. Together with our partner, we wonder what she will look like.

Then there are many couples who choose adoption to fulfill their dreams of becoming parents. They too dream of this child who will one day become part of their family. 

That way, they go through their own special process. They dream, imagine and plan with the same intensity and expectation as any other parent.

When we finally have the little special life in our hands, all we can do is hug our child warmly and gently and make it our own. We know the child’s innermost being, the strength of its heart, the warmth of its skin and the intensity with which it needs us. And now we have before us the greatest of all tasks: to become parents.

To feel is to live. And as I said, it is impossible to describe in words the strong feelings of love and happiness that come with parenthood. Every moment we share with our children is an experience that cannot be described in words.