One day, years ago, I could not console my toddler. I don’t remember why he was writhing and wailing, but I do recall laying us down to shush and coo and hold him close so he could feel my slow breathing, and his body could imitate mine. Instead, he screamed snot that pelted my face as his elbow bludgeoned my lower lip. The shock of pain took me out of myself momentarily. My body’s instinct was to repel the source of violence; but my spirit said, “you the grown up. Love like it.” I cried, though.
It hurt as I held on.
I’ll start homeschooling again next week. I am excited and terrified, feeling inadequate and hopeful. I am not one of those magical mothers who weave creativity from cardboard and dry erase markers; I never fantasized about homemaking and children and domestic engineering. This was all accidental, an intersection of pandemic pragmatism and the unique needs of our family. I am privileged to teach my sons in an era where our bodies and histories are debated as theories and unnecessary testimonies in the syllabus of America. It’s a luxury to speak so keenly into their education that mother-love is a synonym for scholarship.
But that’s also quite frightening. I have the potential to multiply their wounds and subtract from their zeal to pursue knowledge. My village feels claustrophobic. My shoulders sag from worry and responsibility. I wonder, often, how I ended up here. I mean that with all the genuine awe, joy, and terror that I can muster.
This is all thoroughly intimidating: fostering lives, guiding them, feeding them well, loving them fiercely. Daily. Until I die.
When my children were born, so was my parenting. My mothering is as old/new as they are—I am still growing up in this role. At my parenting age, I am a pre-teen with an expansive vocabulary, a desire for autonomy, and a vague idea of how extensive my influence can be, yet unaware of how I hold beauty, power, and possibility. I want to grow up more quickly, but I can’t. I can’t skip steps.
Parenting beautiful, wondrous kids in an age of COVID, ecological and environmental decline, and constant socio-political strife feels the rapid whisper-list of a pharmaceutical commercial; it’s so good and makes us so happy, but it might cause panic attacks, chronic fatigue, thoughts of escape, nagging doubts, numbness, crying spells, and the occasional bloody lip. I feel silent as a weaned child before my Maker in these days. I know that I am staring out the window when I ought to be curating curriculum; I am playing a game on my phone when I have plenty of books to read; I am mute and numb when I should be writing, protesting, speaking out.
I have some friends who look me in the eye and speak grounding and reality into my bones, embarrassingly often because of the weird perspective dysmorphia that being raised by immigrants and evangelicals tends to nurture in a girl child. They remind me of the progress, strength, the beauty. I see the gaps, the misses, the manifold fails, or worse, the way I feel when my lip is suddenly bleeding. The desire is strong to float, out of myself and away, even from the goodness. To feel the relief of nothing.
Rita Dove wrote a poem called “Daystar” that is holding me together today:
She wanted a little room for thinking; but she saw diapers steaming on the line, a doll slumped behind the door. So she lugged a chair behind the garage to sit out, the children's naps. Sometimes there were things to watch- the pinched armor of a vanished cricket, when she closed her eyes she'd see only her own vivid blood. She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared pouting from the top of the stairs. And just what was mother doing out back with the field mice? Why, building a palace. Later that night when Thomas rolled over and lurched into her, she would open her eyes and think of the place that was hers for an hour-where she was nothing, pure nothing, in the middle of the day.
To those of us holding on as it hurts, I wish us moments of pure nothing in the coming weeks and months. Spaces to scoop ourselves up, sun on our faces, and pause.
Whew, that poem. Beautiful writing from a beautiful soul, as always.
I was SO SINCERE. 🤣