Wintering
On Motherhood: The enraptured grief that clarified me as a mother
We painted Easter eggs made of wood. Strokes of watercolor in tones as flamboyant as your mood.
Your hands were stained blue. Not blue like longing or sadness or death. But blue like hope and calm and the sea at last light.
I thought about your Great Grandpa Pete. He died Easter weekend, or maybe it was the weekend before Easter or the one after. I don’t remember exactly, but I remember that it hurt. It still does. The kind of hurt that gnaws away at you in the background until you notice it. And when you do, you try everything to make it stop.
I gave you a bath and the water swirled with the memories of your first Easter. It was snowing and we listened to an instrumental artist from Iceland. Beautiful and luminous neo-classical compositions, but they didn’t move me like your father’s songs. There’s a haunting in your father’s music that speaks to the deepest place in me. To the places that no one knows about. The places that are quiet and lost and yearning. The places that are hurting.
You were playing your tambourine in the triumphant way that you do, as if you’ve just stumbled upon something marvelous. I pointed to the window and we both sat wide-eyed watching the snowfall.
I thought of last winter when you still melted into the curves of my body in the moonlight. When we were both still healing from your long journey Earthside. Months of hibernation, we were syncing our hearts and our breath and our needs.
I looked upon this crucial season of wintering with reverence.
I was mourning the experience I wanted for you as we went from the whole to the separate.
I grieved the lost moment of my face being the first one you saw, you on my chest covered in blood and creamy moon-colored vernix. I remember hearing your voice, but not being able to get to you.
When I finally saw you, you’d already had your first cry. When they finally put you in my arms, you were wrapped in a blanket and someone had put a pink and blue striped hat over your bruised and battered head.
I still have it in a box where I keep all things that are important to me. It’s stained with your blood and my grief and I imagine I won’t look at it until my hair has gone gray, and maybe then, my heart will no longer ache.
“Wintering… is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.” - Katherine May
I needed this time of wintering to feel sad and honest and alive. To get to the center of the thing, to find the clarity of the most inner need, which was to accept what was so that I could be the mother both you and I knew I was meant to be.
It was this towering sadness, this enraptured grief that clarified me as a mother.
It brought me closer to time in a way that I could never understand before, in a way that felt circular. The linear had dissolved and I was everything I’d lost and everything I’d gained. A revolving door. A cyclical rhythm. Just as the seasons come and go, year after year, we change and we grow and we shed our leaves, and in time, we flourish.
When you were born, I was a winter tree after abscission. Abscission, from the Latin words ab (away) and sciendere (to cut) — to cut away. Fractal and naked, I had done away with everything that wasn’t critical for our survival, for our growth. It was only you and me and the reverberant need that we had for one another.
Now, the flowering dogwood in the yard has milky blossoms covering its branches, and the snow sticks to the petals. There’s a heaviness to them that reminds me of the all too familiar feeling of longing. They search for the sun and the warmth like I search for meaning.
I slid your tiny arms into your winter coat that you’ve already outgrown and went outside to catch snowflakes with our eyelashes. The sky changed from white to blue and I had snow in my hair and bare legs in the same afternoon. I kissed your cold hands stained with indigo blue and your brow furrowed because you didn’t understand the magic of a spring snowstorm in the south, but one day you will.
I tell you about how wintering can sometimes take much longer than a season, how it can bleed into many, blurring the lines of suffering and healing. But we’re so close. We’re almost through.
Can you feel it, my darling?
Can you feel the flourish?
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