The heart-pounding territory of wanting

On Motherhood: “This is it,” you said. “And you’re missing it.”

When I think of these last nine months with you I think about change. How much you’ve grown — how sometimes your face wears the expressions of adulthood, how your hands guide you in your explorations with trust and confidence, how you no longer need me to reach the books on the high shelf. But also, I think about how much you’ve changed me. How you’ve brought me further along in myself, stretching me to great depths to discover where glimmering truths were buried. 

And how you’ve led me back to the pieces I’d lost long ago.

A friend of ours came to cook us dinner back when I could still count the months of you being Earthside on one hand. Lentils spiced with turmeric and ginger and methi seeds, jasmine rice, and a Sri Lankan flatbread made from shredded coconut and spicy chiles. The house was warm and it smelled like giving. An offering. A gift. It smelled like friendship. As we ate, lingering on each bite, I took little pauses to make funny faces with you or nuzzle my nose into your cheek or crawl my fingers up your arm to the tune of Itsy Bitsy Spider. I remember my face ached from smiling and I remember the sound of your laugh filling the dining room. 

My friend said, “I love seeing this side of you.”

What side? The side that desperately needed a home-cooked meal after what seemed like an everlong recovery? The side that couldn’t follow a conversation without constantly interrupting to connect with my baby? The side that could no longer host in my own home because I was too exhausted to feed myself, let alone others? 

“This sense of play,” she said. “I’ve never seen this silly, singing side — it suits you.”

I thought about how change can mean both loss and gain. A hollowing out to expand. How I lost my sense to be and to play. To linger and to glory. I lost it long ago. Back when the world first showed me what it was. When my hair was a tangle of dust and tumbleweeds and loneliness gnashed its teeth against my tiny bones. When I thought fairies were real and hope was everlasting. Back when the ones who were meant to bring me comfort brought me chaos. When the walls of our house were always splashed with red and blue. The knocks at the door. The dark and lonely Western Hemisphere with nothing but its stars.

But then you came along with a blaring torch, the flames whipping against the empty wind, and you found me. You pulled me back to everything that was lost. Back to the childhood that had dissolved before I had a chance to live it. You brought me back to the heart-pounding territory of wanting. The trembling landscape of dreams. The radical path toward hope. 

Back to the all-encompassing journey of being —

And into the transcendent lightness of childhood.

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This deep sense of play is not merely what we do, but how we do it. How we exist in the world. How we do the everyday monotony of living. The laundry and grocery shopping and the way we brush our teeth. It is a mood that colors everything. It alters the state of the mundane, pushing it into the realm of the fantastical. This deep play is everything you are and everything I’m not.

I am forever pushing through the dull prosaic chatter of living to get to the thing, whatever the thing is. The trip or the work or the writing. The big plans and the lofty ideas, dripping with expectation and stifled by idealism. A constant gaze toward the horizon. Toward what’s to come.

We took you to Hilton Head Island off the coast of South Carolina — the furthest you’ve been away from home. We’d visited the island at the end of summer during the height of the pandemic. It was empty and untouched and everything I needed it to be. I wanted to show you the blue herons and the egrets. The white sand and sea oats. The marshes and the tidal pools. I wanted to show you everything that I’d felt.

But this time, it was different. It was crowded and hectic — the aftermath of a country being forced to stay home for two years. It violated the memory I’d held so dear and I found myself fumbling around, trying to search for meaning.

But you. You swallowed time and yearning and the looking back. You stopped me from asking so much from the moment, so much from us. Always grasping for more than I need.

On the trip, you started saying mama. We were under a canopy of Spanish moss, eating Belgian waffles soaked in butter and maple syrup, and watching the cranes hunt for food in the marsh grass at the water’s edge. You reached your sticky little hands to me and pressed your lips together. 

Mama. 

I could hear you asking me to pay attention. To notice. To be. 

Here.

“This is it,” you said. “And you’re missing it.”

Mama.

When we got back to the beach rental I laid your ABC blanket over the cold gray tiled floor. You played with tiny astronauts made of wood and laughed until your face flushed with the color of strawberries after a rain. It didn’t matter if we were at the sea or on the floor of a home that wasn’t ours, you found a way into that deep sense of play. To tap into that transcendent lightness where the rest of the world recedes.

There was nothing to do. Nothing to say. Nothing to think.  

It was a beholding of what is.

You’ve taught me to exist in the sacred present, where the past and the future vanish. 

There is only here and now. 

You and me and nothing else.

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More pieces on Motherhood…

Instar, decay, and the riot of my soul