surrendering to motherhood
after four kids, for the first time
I apologize to the month of November. I’ve always thought of it as sort of a foreboding time—all gales and gray skies and the spindly angles of bare trees, black against an early night. I know that comes. But lately, it’s been a rainbow, an orchestra, a gathering of witnesses cheering me all night. Possibly it always has been. I’m just beginning to see.
There’s a new set of eyes in this house and they don’t belong to the baby. Submitting fully to this time, I realize: if there are a million exciting details to enjoy when a life enlarges, there are also a million exciting details to enjoy when it contracts. I lack for nothing, and everything is still possible—even when I mother all the way. “[T]ransformations past the horizon line of exhaustion,” writes Leslie Jamison.
Bruce loves the carrier so we go out a lot. I pull on my boots and we walk down the road to the path in the woods. I sniff the top of his velveteen head while he peers passed my shoulders. Everything ordinary looks unexpected.
Last week there were yellows so rich I had to squint. Maple leaves pinwheeled down bearing three or four colors—splotches of red and yellow and orange and some enduring green. For the first time, I heard a symphony: crunching leaves, popping sticks, the drag of thorn bushes against Christopher’s old waxed jacket—the only coat big enough to wrap around us both. Walking home, I noticed the papery pull of leaves across asphalt. I felt the aliveness of everything.
Driving Clyde back from art class on Monday, I had to pull over to take a photo of a pasture. The audacity of this hill! Has it always been like this? Every November? Russet trees against a glowing pink sky— an unexpected, perfect combination. How many autumn afternoons have I hurried down this road, thinking of groceries or bills or school conference sign-ups? I’m lucky to have this baby hand-brake, and I’m lucky to let it slow me down.
We’re up a lot at night. I walk around the house with Bruce’s butt in my palm, his body slung over my shoulder. I tap his back, which fits in my other hand. We follow the moon around the house. At dinner, she’s over the kitchen sink. By midnight, I watch her through the side door over the brick porch. At three a.m. she’s hanging behind the six tall pine trees that remind me of sentinels guarding our bedroom window. The moon shines easily through their long, stripped trunks and the cold air makes her clearer, more in focus.
I read an interview with Leslie Jamison last week and I love how she describes nighttime with her daughter: “[she] opened up the midnight hours for me…like unzipping a seam in the world. Suddenly, there was three in the morning, and we were inside it together.” I love to think of dwelling with Bruce in a secret pocket. The feeling extends to the whole family—we’re all wrapped in this intimacy. Bruce is raw, eternal, unspoiled and the rest of us are called to rise to the occasion.
Until now, I haven’t allowed myself to surrender into the transformation of new motherhood, despite all my chances. I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure about my career and I suffered the pangs of an unmet identity. I was up against a black wall of fatigue, surviving. We had babies with toddlers underfoot, all of us jammed into a New York City apartment. I wince at the photos from those years because my eyes look sunken and smudged. Quiet was not a luxury inside or outside. Neither was space, nor nature. I need all of those things to make sense of myself.
But the truth is, a big part of me feared submitting to this spell—I wanted to hold onto ‘myself’ to protect against the grief of the boys’ smallness ending. Going this deep into motherhood will hurt later. But one of the benefits of getting older is I’m too soft to fuck around. If the kids growing guts me, let it.
Leslie Jamison again:
What self-transformation am I in the midst of right now? Becoming a mother, which doesn’t happen in the moment of birth, it turns out, but in every moment that precedes it and every moment that follows…I’m simply moving through it with her, like water, noticing things, learning the names of the trees on my block, nursing in front of landscape paintings at the museum, climbing and descending the same set of stairs, over and over again, like a walking meditation…
Bruce’s eyes see all the same things, brand new. He invites deeper attention. It hits me—these years are not just the boys’ childhood, they’re my motherhood, too. It’s a fact so simple I never bothered to think it. I don’t want to protect myself from future heartbreak by holding this era at arm’s length. I want to wrap myself in it completely. I want to notice everything.
Moments drift around us and they’ll settle into memories I can’t predict. Like the leaves that spin and fall, some will be dirt; some may be diamonds. But the shape of our whole lives is not now’s concern. I just have to listen to the woods and rub Bruce’s fuzzy scalp with the tip of my nose and wait for the moon to greet us, zipped into this secret seam. Mother, all the way.
I see the eternal in Bruce’s sweet eyes. And I feel it in your writing, your presence. You are mothering, and living, and coming alive - it’s a joy to witness.
Thank you, for helping me find the beauty in the small, in the now. To stop worrying about tomorrow when such greatness is standing before me waiting to be noticed. It’s important to give grace to our past selves. I wasn’t capable of this mindfulness years ago - I was just trying to survive.
Today, my jaw dropped at bright red leaves I’d ignored yesterday, and the day before...but we’re getting there.
okay okay last one i swear.
dwelling with Bruce in a secret pocket (!!!!) i look at my seventeen year old man now, when we take the time to really share a glance, a word, when he lets me paint mud mask on his face, bless him, i realize, we DWELLED IN THE SECRET POCKET together! in the dead of night, we followed the moon, i took my time and just went with it, even appreciated it, on my own, and now he totally trusts and respects me.
but his ass was in my palm yesterday, i swear. that's the only confusing part.
this piece is a serious gift, sister. thank you.