Her eyes slide shut and she gives a tiny sigh. Content, her belly full of milk, she sleeps in my arms. The love I feel for her is fierce and tender, utterly compelling; unbidden, it springs up in parents' hearts and never goes away.

It astounds me to realize that my mother held me in her arms just this same way. To know that even as I've grown, some part of that fierce tenderness must linger in her feelings toward me. My grandmother comes to see me, and holding my baby in her arms, she speaks of my father's infant days. Does she still feel that same mother-love for my father--all 6 feet and 50-something years of him? It's incomprehensible, and yet it must be so, because I know the consummate caring I feel for my daughters is not unique to me, but is an essential piece of this weird and wonderful thing we call motherhood.

Someday, my sweet little baby is going to yell at me. She will sit with her friends and talk about all the horrible things I do to her. She may not even like me. Because that's a part of being a mother and a daughter too. Difficult as it is to imagine that eventuality, I know that even when those times come, even when I look at her in frustration or anger, I'll be seeing her with these same eyes. How mysterious and humbling it is, to realize that my parents see not just the woman I've become, but also the baby I once was. And how comforting, to think that these quiet moments, when it is just she and I in the circle of lamplight, will always be a part of me.