Dear Tia,

I KNEW — from the moment I saw your tiny heartbeat — you had a strong will. There you were, a speck of lint, yet you glowed, 140 beats a minute, a flicker so determined, it dominated the screen.

Later, on an echocardiogram, we watched your heart flutter like the wings of a butterfly, valves throbbing, blood swirling like a color-coded storm on a Doppler weather map.

I was awed. I was thrilled. I was scrunched on my side, smeared with ultrasound gel, gazing into my daughter's heart. I wanted to cheer. I wanted to pee. Then I realized I had no idea what I was looking at or what any of it meant. I wondered if I should be worried. I wondered if I should've stopped eating sushi. I wondered: Is this what it is to be a mother?

"Y'KNOW GOLDFISH?"

We're standing in the parking lot, me and a macho photographer friend who swore he'd never get married, never have kids, then did both and now delights in showing off the pictures.

"Y'know how you bring goldfish home and they swim around awhile and then die because they're so fragile?" he says. "Babies are more hardy than goldfish."

YOU WERE a surprise, Tia.

Given my age, I was surprised to get pregnant so fast or at all, surprised I didn't throw up, surprised to smell the softness of moss and the pinkness of petals and the changing shape of melting ice cubes; surprised how the dread of losing control over my own body turned to wonder at the growth of yours; surprised how even when I was thinking about other things (deadlines, refugees, misplaced keys), you kept growing: fingernails, eyelashes, the enchantment over your father and me.

That spring in Thailand, when you were in my tummy and we were biking along the road to Dr. Cynthia's clinic, we stopped at our favorite street-side stand and I slurped down a steaming bowl of noodles topped with squiggly bean sprouts and crescents of hardboiled egg. Then another bowl. And a third. No wonder I was hungry. At 20 weeks, you'd already manufactured 200 billion neurons and 6 million eggs. More than enough brain cells to last a lifetime! More than enough eggs for grandchildren!

Nagging you? Already? Absolutely not! Mama is just being practical. Because I waited so many years to have you, I may not be around, I may not remember what's important, if you dally as long as I did.

I hope I'm still here. I hope we're always close. I'll try not to tell you what to do; I'll just try to tell you what it's like, so far, to be a mother.

ONE FRIDAY night before you were born, we went to Ballard Market and bought plums for 78 cents a pound, strawberries, beans, kitchen cleanser, goldfish crackers, ice-cream cones, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, flour, sugar, salt. The cashier wryly asked: "So, you two headed for the Hemp Fest?"

I was looking, well, 38 weeks pregnant, 38 years old and 38 pounds heavier than my usual. Your father was looking like the kindly, shirt-tucked-in, middle-aged pediatrician that he is. You got the joke, I assumed, because when we all laughed, you giggled, too, so hard it triggered hiccups.

I often wondered about your hiccups. Did you know they would go away, that something else was next? Or did you live hiccup to hiccup, floating in the moment, blissfully unaware you'd leave the womb and enter a world with your life stretched ahead?

EVERYBODY TALKS about the divide between working moms and stay-at-home moms, poor mothers vs. privileged mothers, day care vs. nannies, ad nauseum.

The great gap, really, is between life with children and life without. It's like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, peering into haze. You know something's out there, but can't focus clearly on what it is until after you leap, which seems doubly unfair because it's one of the few decisions once you make, you can't change.

It changes you.

When I tiptoed to the edge (for a decade I teetered there), squinting across, eavesdropping on the cultural conversation, I heard an awful lot of mommy anxiety.

"Once my daughters began school," Judith Warner writes in "Perfect Madness," "I was surrounded, it seemed, by women who had surrendered their better selves — and their sanity — to motherhood. Women who pulled all-nighters hand-painting paper plates for a class party. Who obsessed over the most minute details of playground politics. Who — like myself — appeared to be sleep-walking through life in a state of quiet panic. Why do so many otherwise competent and self-aware women lose themselves when they become mothers? Why do so many of us feel so out of control? And — the biggest question of all — why has this generation of mothers, arguably the most liberated and privileged group of women America has ever seen, driven themselves crazy in the quest for perfect mommy-dom?"

(Please pass the birth control!)

Listen to most chatter about motherhood and you get stuck in Hallmark sap or ensnared in logistics (nipple shields, carpools, kindergarten pre-tests). Even friends once articulate and insightful seem to lose it when they become parents. Bleary, they can barely hold a thought long enough to tell it to you, and when they do, after countless interruptions, it's about their baby's possible ear infection: Red enough to call the doctor? Or maybe he's just overheated from being overdressed? They notice your dismay, quickly backpedal: It's great having kids! FUN! You'll LOVE being a mother!

(Mental note: Use a backup method!)

Each parenting book brings a new way for mothers to obsess. But underneath the trends, across cultures, through time, there's an indescribable constant, a force that drives us (sometimes crazy): Mama Love.

"Parents . . . seem surprised at their own helplessness in the face of the passion they feel for their children," writes Louise Erdrich in "The Blue Jay's Dance." "We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambition, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before."

BEFORE. Before you were born, I traveled.

Oddly, it was outside the blare of my own culture where I most clearly glimpsed mother love.

Every year, your father and I volunteered at a tin-roof refugee clinic on the Thailand-Burma border. Every morning, the women would come, children in arms, waiting for the clinic to open. There was something about the quiet tilt of the mothers' heads, the way their sick children pressed against them in the heat, a shared dampness. We knew they'd walked a long way, risked arrest, that they'd sit forever on the plank benches, do whatever it took to make their children well.

My last overseas assignment, before you were born, was about women and AIDS in Zimbabwe, a country marked by political violence. Driving with me to the airport, your grandmother was uncharacteristically quiet. "I just wish you didn't have to go," she finally said.

"Mom," I had prepared for this, "I don't have to. I want to." I launched into my little speech: We're women, lucky enough to live in a society where women have a voice. Hadn't she taught me to use that voice for those who weren't so lucky — especially other women?

"Yes, but," she didn't bother to continue. She knew I was on my high horse — on the other side of the Grand Canyon.

Her only comfort, she said, was that I was traveling with Betty Udesen, a veteran photojournalist who'd keep us out of trouble. Don't worry, I said, we'll probably just sit around, sip tea, chat with other women.Oh, the stories the African women told. Can't say no if their husbands want sex, can't stop him from sleeping around, can't insist on a condom. He gets sick; she cares for him until he dies. Now she has AIDS, no drugs to control it, and she's doomed to orphan her children in a country with little food.

And you? The women politely inquired. Married? Yes, each of us, to wonderful guys. No kids.

No children? Gently, sadly, they patted our arms. They felt sorry for us.

IT'S TRUE, you forget the pain.

But I remember almost everything else about your birth, Tia. Late summer, the dark blue horizon, the swoopy cry of morning swallows when the contractions started. Mars was a coppery sparkle in the southeast sky, as close as it had come to our planet in 60,000 years.

Your father, an expert in visual display of quantitative information, programmed a graph to plot the time and duration of contractions. I ate lasagna and read a story about bike messengers. (No nesting urge to clean house; motherhood changes you only so much.) We drove to the hospital through Bumbershoot throngs. I wondered about etiquette in hospital elevators. Should I get in and subject fellow passengers to a coming contraction? Or wait for the next elevator? And the next contraction?

Twenty-seven hours of labor, 20 contractions an hour, your father's comforting touch, my doula's steady voice, Betty's calm strength: "Mile 23 of the marathon!" More a triathlon, really, in and out of tub, up and down squat bar, arms clutching birth ball, groaning, growling, grunting, no drugs because I hate arriving at a destination groggy after a long journey. I wanted you to enter the world with a clear head.

We see it. Your head, beneath a shimmery bubble of membrane. My water never broke, so you emerge encased. The doctor-on-call rushes by between two other births. "Not imminent," he declares.

"Whaddya mean? Not IMMINENT?" I scream. Which dictionary is this guy using? I can already see my baby's wavy black hair!

Then you slither out, left fist raised, eyes open wide. Solidarity, Mama! You poop. You gaze at me, not the unfocused stare of a newborn, but rather, the understanding look of an old friend. It's as if, all along, we've known each other's heart.

STRANGE HOW, so soon after birth, this sense of impending loss.

Everything gushes out: milk, blood, tears. I cuddle you and wallow in every emotion on the planet. You are perfect, precious, your tropical-bird chirps, your hair soft as fluff in a milkweed pod, your smell of sour cream and cookie dough plus a whiff of raw metal from the iron in your blood.

I'm terrified something will happen to you. I dream of chasing kidnappers up spiral stairs: Gimme back my baby! I make everyone within 100 yards of you use antibacterial Purell. This is all (more or less) normal for new mothers, I'm told.

So the days pass, each more adorable and brilliant. You learn to request milk in sign language. You wake up laughing, so thrilled with birds, baths, books and balls you stop wanting to sleep, and soon, I'm so tired, the edges of my mind dissolve. Your father suggests we sleep train you. I read two books, three articles and consult friends: She'll cry, then learn to fall asleep on her own. It'll be a few miserable nights; a leap to independence.

You wail for 51 minutes. Not garden-variety crying. It's personally directed at me, as in Mama, MILK! (chubby hands pump sign for milk) Mama! Don't abandon me! (arms outstretched, eyes imploring) MAMA! I need you! (rattle crib bars).

Breast milk normally trickles from faraway mountains, rivulets joining streams then roaring river before rushing into baby's sucking mouth, only this time, since your little lips are howling in another room, mama milk soaks our sheets and splashes watery white on the floor. When you're quiet, finally, I sob myself to sleep, too.

In the morning, miraculously, the sun rises. We still love each other. Everything springs from there.

TWENTY PERCENT profound, 80 percent mundane, caring for a baby.

The profound? Long walks; our little jokes (rubbing noses!); your pure, uncluttered feelings. Bored? Yawn. Happy? Smile. I linger in your moments, hughughug.

The mundane? We nap, we play the chickens CD a zillion times, exchange slightly competitive pleasantries with other playground moms, sweep, sort insurance forms, simmer all-day lemongrass and leftover turkey soups. I take pride in pinpointing, at any given moment, all three pacifiers and knowing which is clean.

This mental map of The Three Binkies bothers me. Immersed in lactation and binky location, I'm forgetting the barefoot brown children I once knew who have sores on their feet. My voice has shrunk to lullaby level. News from outside is muffled, the soup vapors and cozy atmosphere so thick, my thoughts take forever to reach my brain.

You are 12 months old, solid enough to nap on the grass without me fearing a raptor will swoop you away. It's time to re-enter the world.

GOING BACK to work is hard, but less traumatic than sleep training. You have doting grandparents around the corner, a great baby-sitter, zoo mornings with your dad when he's not on call. I have a job I love and women editors who totally understand.

Still, I miss you, and miss SLEEP. There's the lost notebook, stretched deadlines, the dark, rainy night when, horrors!, I fender-bender a BMW owned by the people I'm interviewing. I need a larger work bag, big enough for laptop, lunch and a breast pump that has seven separate pieces to wash in the bathroom sink. When you're a peevish teen yelling, "You don't love me, Mama!" a friend jokes, I should dig a frozen milk packet from the freezer and wave it in your face: "Tia! I am still ready to give you mama milk!"

Seventy-two percent of mothers with children older than 1 are in the workforce, according to the 2002 U.S. Census. Every mom has different reasons and realities, but basically, you decide, make your peace, somehow manage.

When Harvard President Lawrence Summers made his infamous comments about female brains and the dearth of top women scientists, he also noted, "the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions . . . near total commitments to their work . . . a large number of hours in the office . . . a flexibility of schedules . . . and they expect — and this is harder to measure — but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. . . ."

Don't let him scare you, Tia. All three of your aunts have careers and kids; two are lawyers, one is a tenured professor of medicine, bioengineering and medicinal chemistry — a scientist. Neuroscientists at the University of Virginia discovered, through experiments using Froot Loops, that mother rats lead the pack on learning and memory tests. Besides, whatever you do, you can always call. I'll come. I'll babysit.

BEFORE MY PARENTS had children, they decided not to get life insurance, instead using that money to pay my mother's graduate-school tuition. Education is security, they figured. With a master's degree, my mother could earn enough to support the family should anything happen to my father. She finished her degree in five years, taking classes at night, teaching junior high by day. Soon, my oldest sister was born.

You know how you're so close to your grandparents, Tia? I was close to my grandmother, too, and every evening before bed, Nyin would tell me stories about her Chinese grandmother, a second wife who adopted a son after she was left widowed and childless at 19.

Nyin's grandmother made courageous decisions that have everything to do with our lives today: First, she didn't bind Nyin's feet. If Nyin's feet had been bound, she wouldn't have been able to walk far or work hard and may never have crossed the Pacific. Second, she had an old uncle teach Nyin and other village girls to read and write. This had never been done. Third, she sent Nyin to America, at 17, in an arranged marriage with a Chinese laundryman in Baltimore.

If not for your great-great-great-grandmother's vision, how easily we could have been among the many women in the world who can't read, let alone write.

YOU LOVE books.

Your current favorite is "Mama, Do You Love Me?" by Barbara Joosse, about an impish Inuit girl. Would you love me if I dropped our ptarmigan eggs? she asks her mother. If I put lemmings in your mukluks? Sang with wolves? Turned into a musk-ox?

I would be surprised, worried, angry, scared and sad, her mother replies, but I will love you, forever and for always, because you are my Dear One.

You're at that sweet toddler stage, Tia, when if you're headed for disaster, I can scoop you up, turn you around and away you scamper.

It won't always be this easy. You'll grow. Along the way, we'll likely disagree on the usual: curfew, music, friends, as well as things I can't possibly expect.

Every generation struggles. Whether to bind a girl's feet or teach her to read; have children or not; birth or adopt; work or stay home; explore the world or sit at a desk; donate money or spend it on clothes.

At some point, only you will know what's best for you. There are many ways to live a meaningful life. You must listen to your own strongly beating heart, your will.

And I will

love you forever and for always,

Mama

Paula Bock is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Her e-mail is pbock@seattletimes.com. Michelle Kumata is a Seattle Times news artist.