The wax-melting summer
On Motherhood: The seconds ticking against my pulse, you’ve made the present mine
It was June, and on a day full of promise, you turned eleven months. The air was heavy, like hands resting on our shoulders. Hot and thick, you could see a creeping wetness floating just above the surface of the river. My hair stuck to my face and my neck and my shoulders. Your cheeks were sun-warmed, glowing like rose petals. We dipped our toes into the cold water, quenching our thirst, and slid our feet over the stones until we reached the bright spot under the archway of rhododendrons. The gentle current swirled with flecks of gold and weaved through your tiny fingers. Your laughter ricocheted off the trees into my chest.
I hope you remember this wax-melting summer when you placed the present in my hands. “Here,” you said. “This is yours. This has always been yours.”
Before you, the past was closed around my life like a clenched fist; palms wet and knuckles white. I had been too wrapped up in searching for myself there — grasping onto the flickering hope that my childhood was built out of more than just chaos and afterthoughts — to notice, or savor, where I was.
The present was something to pass through, on my way [back] to something better. But you, you’ve made the present exist, exist for what it is. Like the stars in the cloud-sheltered sky — there, but never seen — you cleared away the blanketed dark. “There,” you said, pointing to the field of stars. “You can see it, can’t you?” Then you reached for the moon as if to pluck it from the sky, and we felt with our fingers the present’s brightness.
I tape poems to the bedroom wall so we don’t forget to absorb the language that helps us describe the things that we feel but never quite know how to name. Poems about rage and resilience and rest. Poems about grief, about home, about everything we still don’t understand about love. Poems about you and me, about us, about family, because that’s what we are — a family. Don’t let the world try to tell you any different.
Before I wrote to [and about] you, I wrote about your family. The family I had before you made me yours. And I guess, in more ways than I like to admit, I still am writing about them. I probably will always be in some form or another, but now I’m writing from the place of discovery. Not of them, but of me. I no longer need them to tell me who I am.
Before you, like the hummingbird, I waited for midsummer, for the long yellow day and the foxgloves filled with nectar. I waited for the peaches and the thunderstorms and the fireflies to tell me their names. I waited for my heart to open and close and open again, like the swallowtail butterfly beating over the echinacea flower, sucking the world through its tongue. I waited for the trees to tell me that everything was going to be okay; they could only say what they knew, and what they knew was that stillness was the way to living. I waited, waited, waited for something. The longing welled up in my throat in the brass heat, and I know now that I’d been waiting for you, waiting for home, waiting to be happy.
Mary Oliver has said that happiness, when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness. I guess I never did it right because the feeling was always fleeting; a hollowness I didn’t know how to fill. But now I know what she meant.
There is your smile in the blue mornings.
There are the tender wedges of lime on the counter that fill our mouths with yearning.
There is the rain in your eyelashes.
There are the poems on the wall, in our heads, on our lips.
There is the indigo that lingers at twilight.
There is the song of the finches and the wind chime on the porch.
There is the sort of shining wonder that comes with being young.
There are your hands gripping the soft flesh of my arm when you’re tired.
There is the hurt and the healing and the unspoken hope.
There are the blackberry stains on our clothes.
There are the lights in the stairway and the water that is always warm.
There is the writing that is never done.
There are the dried birthday flowers in the fruit basket.
There are the fireflies at the tips of our fingers.
There is your breath in the dark.
There is the scent of books and of heirloom irises and of your hair after you’ve slept.
There is a home.
There is you.
There is this, now.
The seconds ticking against my pulse, you’ve made the present mine. You’ve made it ours, and there is holiness in all of it.
Read more pieces on motherhood…