Real post on becoming a mom

(I posted something last week, but this is what I really wrote.)
Before I had a baby, up through my pregnancy, I thought becoming a mother was automatic- something you felt the moment you gave birth. And then I pushed out my daughter and didn't feel it immediately. Oh, I was delighted with her, and happy, but I didn't feel "mother."
I still don't feel it all the time. Sometimes I want to look around for the real mother of these kids running around in my backyard. Once I saw this cute little baby that someone was holding a few rows ahead of me in church- "that looks like Ali," I thought. And then I realized it WAS Ali. I'd lent him to a friend for a few minutes and forgotten all about it.
I feel most like a mother now when Leila crawls into my bed at 5 am with a tummyache, and I have to make it go away. So, even though I want to roll over into sleep, I begin to rub her back. I choose, at that moment, to be a mother. And it's a choice I make over and over again (or not) when I choose not to yell, or not to turn away to my own desires, but to attend to hers.
Kind of religious, ain't it?