Warning: Motherhood and mothers may surprise you

The other night I was reading about infant massage while a television detective discussed the definition of a psychopath.

Not the first choice of programming for a new mother, but I kept quiet. Law and Order type television has always been my mother's favorite entertainment. She was here to teach me a thing or two about motherhood, and if I had to tolerate a psychological profile of killers in order to learn the difference between my infant's cry for hunger or gas pain, who was I to object?

Instead, I tried to accept such contradictions as a condition of motherhood. In fact, such contrasts are something I have learned to appreciate in part because of my own mother.

My mother is not the type you'd expect to find fascinated by the criminal element. She is generous to a fault, religious, and the woman who taught me the main tenet of my life: leave a place better than how you found it. She also just happened to spend two years reading every book on serial killers and murder the local library had to offer.

It was an interest I took in stride, and even found it amusing.

There is no one in my life that is full of more amusing contrasts than my mother. On this visit, I was surprised when I walked into the kitchen to see her giving Paul a lesson on butchering deer. A friend had been so generous as to give to us a large doe he had shot, and my mother, who never quite took to camping had the raw leg spread out on our kitchen counter as she explained the finer points of separating sinew from meat.

"I took a butchering class in college," she replied to my stunned silence.

"I didn't know they offered that in college," was my understated reply.

My mother did a wonderful job of preparing me for life's surprises. Though motherhood, and the emotion attached to it, still caught me off guard.

After a co-worker retold stories of post-pregnancy emotions when she was reduced to tears by a Johnson and Johnson commercial, we laughed, knowing that such emotional displays are funny but serious stuff when experienced. You can blame it on the hormones, although lately I've been thinking maybe it's a kind of preparation. 18 years of the emotion you're about to experience packed into one post-partum moment.

Unfortunately, I have watched too many true crime shows with my mother to be moved to tears by clean babies.

I expected that I would feel a mother's protective love for my baby. I know that having a child means you put your heart out on the line by sending them out into a world that doesn't always yield to one's finer dreams, but also sometimes does. But after years of watching crime shows with my mother I've learned that you can't spend a lifetime worrying, but that you can control some things - like the infant massage. And in a world gone mad, sometimes that can be the saving grace of a situation.

My emotional outpouring came in different dress. The first time my baby shivered from cold I wanted to stop his shivers, but I also felt an overwhelming pang for babies everywhere that might be cold. As strange as it may sound, when my baby is hungry, I find myself thinking of all the hungry babies. And as a course of action, I find myself going through my baby's things to find donations for those in need.

Those years of watching my mother's generosity must have soaked in deeper than I realized, and resurfaced now that I am a mother.

I have always tried to be generous - most people do. But we give money to charity and our clothes to goodwill without really thinking about the affect those acts have on lives.

The birth of my baby made me able to feel what that generosity means, it made me realize that there is a person on the other end of my generosity - another baby, another mother and another family not so unlike my own. I now see beyond the rather rote removal of extra things that has accompanied my charitable giving, and now seek to give a little deeper - not just the stuff I might not want anymore, but the stuff that might do someone else more good than it did for me.

After all, a family in need might just have a baby that does not look so different from my own. And each act provides a palpable product: warmth, security or relief that did not exist before.

It is a surprise to me that motherhood made me able to feel this, and an even bigger surprise that I never realized it before.

The awareness may not fight crime, but it will make the world a kinder place and, most importantly, allow me to understand my own impact in the lives of others.

Christine Hensleigh is the editor of the Whitefish Pilot and new mother on maternity leave.