there are moments in our lives that tend to stand out when we get into a contemplative mood. moments that make us feel human, make us feel alive, for whatever reasons.

as a parent, those moments seem innumerable. i am not personally particular with actual dates and times, and i am not one of those mothers who know exactly, down to the seconds, when their kids’ umbilical cords fell off, but i do have a photographic memory of how an event affected me emotionally, at the time it happened.

like the first time my eldest son took his first steps. we took him outside the house, the sun was slowly setting, and it was getting a little chilly. he was wearing his tiny blue sneakers that made him look like a trying hard grown up boy, and he was drooling at the prospect of being independent. i can still picture the sky, and can even describe the scent of the breeze, and how my heart was bursting with so many ambiguous emotions, it almost made me cry. but…don’t ask me what date it was.

with my eldest starting preschool two weeks ago, i have been experiencing a lot of these moments. an emotional roller coaster of sorts that sometimes unnerve me.

the other day, i was holding his hand as i assisted him out of the car. all of a sudden, the little baby boy who used to be so helpless and small, was not there anymore. without warning, his grip, which used to be so tight it could almost crush my fingers, loosened up, and he started walking  faster. ahead of me.

it was a moment.

a rite of passage if i may say so. nothing was said, but very loudly, i heard every statement.

he wants me to let go, he wants to start his own discoveries, he wants me behind him. i honestly don’t know what it was exactly that made me all melodramatic and creepily emotional, but i just did. i stood there with an uncomfortable sense of undefinable emotions.

i am not unaware of the cycles of life. if there are things that i know for sure, one of those things is the fact that my children are not going to stay dependent on me for a lifetime. whether they choose to or not, that is just what is going to happen. the usual course is that they will find out about life, and they will eventually want to live it the way they want to.

i don’t even know if it is acceptable to say that my being a mother excuses me from being labeled as irrational, but i do not have any logical explanation for what i felt. there i was, in the middle of the preschool parking lot, mourning the idea that i already lost my little boy to the world. on the surface, i knew how i blew the whole scene out of proportion and that i was overreacting like a pathetic drama queen, but it’s the truth. it maybe embarassing, but there is no point in me telling a lie.

i have to admit it didn’t really bother me on some specific level. it wasn’t the fact that i wanted, so badly, to keep him to myself, but the fact that i was overwhelmed by the idea of him being exposed to what the real world is. after all, he is a four year old whose defintion of sadness is based on being deprived to eat more candies. how i wish i can shield him from the frustrations, the bitterness, the pain that life so commonly brings. how i wish he will just pass through life experiencing only the good and the beautiful. who am i kidding?

i wished that, and i mocked myself. really, what kind of life is a shielded life? it seems like a parallel for an unexamined life. and, as one great philosopher pointed out, “an unexamined life is not worth living.”

i drove home with a long list of contradictory thoughts and emotions. something i learned and continue to learn to deal with everyday since i decided to let two human beings call me “Mom”.