#060722: We can put ourselves back together

Thoughts on being a mom

Sometimes when I think about writing about being a mom, I feel like I’m clenching my buttcheeks or letting them spread too thin — projecting this character who has it together completely or doesn’t have it together at all.

Both of these characters carry qualities that I can relate to very intimately, and at their extremes, they tend to seem like the most pervasive narrative templates out there for the kinds of parents who live out loud. Not necessarily just online like this but IRL in smallchat or coldtalk too.

Neither quite reflects the reality of what it really feels like to be a mom, which is more like this pretty intuitive and therefore kind of casual feature that gets added to your identity, like a new sound system for your car, which makes driving more pleasant but not architecturally different on one hand, but then on the other can feel more like a new steering wheel, disruptive enough to make you think it’s a different car completely.

In the end what I find the most comfort in saying is that being a mom is kind of like being anyone else whose just wants to live their life in the most honest way. Of course wanting is different from trying is different from living and when you’re a parent the truths you have to accept do tend to sneak up when you weren’t expecting to see them.

The mornings have been really good lately but there was a rough stretch for a few of weeks in May when every single morning would turn into a screaming match. I had been pretty diligent priorly about taking to my room to yell into a pillow, legs flailing so high they could hit the ceiling when the audibly shrieky indecisiveness of what it’s like to be a 4-year-old girl x 2 would rub up against me so uncomfortably that my own blood would start to carbonate. The hair or the teeth (brushing for both) or the cataclysmic choice of dress — it was so inconsequential and yet so big. And even more time consuming.

I’d return to their room red in the face with a halo of hair surrounding it but for the most part, they didn’t know that when I had left, where I had gone was to launch my own chorus of shrieks — they didn’t know til I dropped the partition and joined in their own.

They’d yell, then I’d yell, “We’re gonna be late!” and from there, we’d find ourselves making our way through the same trenchant storm.

Here I’m supposed to be sturdy, a tree trunk rooted in gusty wind — a dependable wayfinder for them to come back to. But more often than not for those weeks in May, we’d fly up through the storm together.

On most mornings, when we would get to school I’d see a glare in both of their gazes that crushed me. I could detect what was still a concept so foreign to them, even though they could feel the sensation — it was that of disappointment, burgeoning between their brows. It’s the same look I used to give to my mom when I was so young and so desperate too for an anchor, a tree trunk to root me when it seemed I’d be caught in the wind forever. Why did she join my storms?

I’ve asked it so many times before but lately have been thinking that the question’s beside the point. Or even actually that it misses the point. We never stayed in those storms forever. After long, the air would calm and we’d exit the fury, one then the other.

I think I spent so much time so mad that I never quite saw how the storms would end — how we finally got through them for good.

After the fact, there was always a moment of recognition. She’d stare into my eyes and with her gaze of sometimes remorse or just plain directness and always of sheer understanding, she would confront what had just happened: she fell apart while I was falling and our debris mixed in with the other’s. Sometimes I could feel in those subsequent moments the intensity that lived inside both of us — hers of huge responsibility and mine of helplessly raw dependence.

There was a honesty so thorough it was almost brazen about these moments of confrontation.

After a time she stopped joining my storms, which went on for some years until recently, when they’ve started to come back again. Occasionally, too, she’d still have her own and I’m glad for them now when I look back now at the storms we got caught in together.

They showed me a truth I didn’t see elsewhere, one I did not want to see at home either — that, yes, we are mothers but also, we’re people and people fall apart.

You can try not to let your kids see it, and it’s a noble pursuit I subscribe to — but when they do, which they do, there is also a choice: you can feel guilt and regret, you can brush it off or keep it all to yourself. Keep it all to yourself as you lock it behind a door bursting with what we try to avoid. You can tell yourself it won’t happen again and move on like it never happened before — or you can remember that yes, you’re a mother.

That a mother is also a person and people fall apart.

And when you vow to stay out of their storms, you can mean it but then when you do find yourself caught in another storm again, you can also vow to forgive that.

When the wind has started to temper and you know it’s time to corroborate the disappointment in their brows, under the big glassy eyes that look back at you, you can look at your kids and show them and show you that you’re there, rooted back in the ground.

You can tell them that what they saw was real — you did fall apart. But what’s happening now when you look in their eyes and confirm all of this to them, is that they’re seeing you come back together. They’re watching you put yourself back together.

People fall apart, you can teach them. They fall apart but not forever. We can always put ourselves back together.