Who Invited You?

It's a joke my Polish great-grandmother used to say whenever you did something silly or stupid: Who invited you? And now it's been one year ten months two weeks and four days since the Critter was born, and still I look at him trotting down the sidewalk ahead of me, practicing his jumping, playing with his cars, drawing with his crayons, writing with my pens ... and I wonder: Where did you come from? Who invited you?

I ask Beckett if he ever stops to marvel at the fact that he is actually a father! Of the Critter! How did that happen? How bizarre! He says that no, he does not think such thoughts. But I cannot be alone in my feeling that it is strange to be a mother to a creature I know so intimately and who yet surprises me every day—or in my wonder that the strangeness of being a mother seems to have no end.