Somewhere along the path to motherhood, maybe while you’re pregnant or before you ever even get pregnant to begin with, you tell yourself you’re not going to do it.

You’re not going to let motherhood become your life.

Motherhood will be part of a complete package that includes job and friends, husband and hobbies.

But it won’t take over.

Sure enough, as soon as your uterus quits contracting, you buy one of those jogging strollers, and you start whipping your post-baby self into self-actualized shape.

And every time the baby cries, your throat constricts.

You get on with it.

You not only go back to work, you get a promotion. You reinvigorate wine klatches with your BFFs and romantic dates with your husband. You even find time to read heady novels and self-help books at night.

And when your daughter’s first-grade class sings “You’ve Got A Friend” at the milk-scented elementary school around the corner, your heart grows three sizes.

You keep on working the complete package like the women’s magazines say you should. You find a Latin dance class on Wednesday nights, and you take up African drumming and pilates yoga. You and your husband buy new bikes and talk about taking long rides on the new trail in town.

And every time your middle schooler scores a soccer goal, you score one with her.

You tell yourself you’re not doing it. You’re not becoming enmeshed with your daughter like your mother was with you. You don’t tell her what to wear or demand that her soccer coach put her in the starting lineup. You don’t, God forbid, ever make her feel like she has to take care of you.

You are you, and she is she.

And every time your high-school daughter cries about a boy, your skin hurts like you have shingles.

On college move-in day, you take care that you’re not one of those hovering helicopter mothers that has to be kicked off campus. To prove how good you are at letting go, when the parking lot attendant asks for a contact phone number while you move your daughter into her new dorm, you give him her cell number, not yours.

And once the furniture has been arranged, and the bed has been made, once Jack Johnson is wafting from her iPod and her friends are starting to text, you become the one who stands and says, “I’ll let you finish up here.”

You fasten around her neck the parting gift you picked for her, the sterling-silver necklace adorned with two tiny hearts entwined, and you trip on your feet in your hurry to get home, to prove that you are more than a mother, even though it occurs to you that being a mother is the best thing that ever happened to you.

You realize in this moment, caught between her future and your past, that motherhood has been your greatest teacher, too. You could not, as it turns out, contain its lessons in giving without expecting; guiding without controlling; and loving without holding. They will be with you always, informing every aspect of your life, whether your daughter is here or there.

It is ironic on this day when you are supposed to be letting go, that you find comfort in the very thing you had been avoiding.

You can’t help it that motherhood became your life, or that as you stumble outside her room, you begin to cry.

You never invited motherhood to become the wrapping for the package.

It just did.

(Journalist Debra-Lynn B. Hook of Kent, Ohio, has been writing about family life since she was pregnant with the first of her three children in 1987. E-mails are welcome at dlbhook@yahoo.com.)

By DEBRA-LYNN B. HOOK