the crone & her baby

maiden —> mother —> me: a manifesto

I haven’t written much about our baby, Bruce, but the truth is, I ache. He’s the studliest spud, the loveliest lump, the pinkest most porcine a person could be and his purity makes me panic. He’s the last occupant of my womb, which I imagine, in its new emptiness, as a wrinkling raisin.

Willem de Kooning // Woman and Bicycle

Since Bruce was born every moment has felt like a fresh ending. Sometimes I feel I’m grabbing at time, watching it pass. “It’s like trying to hold water in a cracked teacup,” my mentor, Helene, told me. The harder I snatch, the more frenzied I feel.

Naturally, the solution is to be with Bruce every second. Cancel all plans. Be in the house just staring at his face, delighting in his full-body smiles and poke-y ears and green boogers like the honeymooner I am.

But the walls close in.

When Max was born, we didn’t have the resources for childcare until I went back to work at the DA’s office. But that was great because I was blown open and in love. All I wanted to do was watch baby Max smile as I nibbled his ears and picked his nose.

But I remember the exact second, sitting on the apartment rug, when I realized oh my god, this is not enough. It felt like a betrayal to be so bored. Existentially bored.

In my decade of mothering, the one thing I’ve learned is: you stretch to hold the contradictions. Your heart beats harder and stronger, but also more elastic because it has been detonated by love and sadness; your body shot through with adrenaline and fatigue. You feel elated, and you look at your watch…how many hours ‘til bedtime? You long for things to be always just as they are this very moment, but also—you can’t wait to sleep through the night.

I know in my osteopenic bones that what folks say is true: it does go by so fast. That first baby now turns all our thermostats to ‘69.’ The second wears Nike sweatsuits and gold chains. All I did was blink.

There’s nothing like a pubescent boy to thrust you into crone energy. I’ll be forty this September, and things are changing. And I LIKE IT. I’m still squarely in the mother phase, but sometimes my crone-self smiles at me from just beyond the threshold. (If you think I’m too young for this, have a look at the chart below.)

When I was a girl, nothing scared me more than getting up at night and seeing a different face in the bathroom mirror. And now I do, and it’s… fascinating. I’m so curious about my little droopy eyelids and the shadows across my forehead. They herald an identity apart from prettiness and physical fertility and I’m like ooooh, weiiird, yeeeees.

The other day, I bought lip balm at Target that came in a pink and gold tube. The emollient was clear and, in the dark car, I smeared it all over my dry lips and around their stinging edges. When we sat down for dinner—hours later—Augie (age 8, sweatsuit boy) looked at me and said, as delicately as he could: “you should try to get it just on your mouth.” This was some gimmicky gloss for tweens that turns colors against warm skin, so I’d prepped dinner with hot pink smeared outside all the lines like a de Kooning woman.

The maiden would be embarrassed. The mother shrugs. But the crone laughs.

The tensions of motherhood are what bring you into crone energy, which itself is full of contradictions: wise but returning to innocence; soft but taught as a wire. The best and worst thing about the cusping crone is…she’s not naive. The seasoned mother knows every small celebration is also a turning away.

She’ll resent, for example, the first tooth that pops through the virgin gum-line—the signs of agency and independence. This child will eat meat, he’ll rip and tear. She’ll offer the softness of her body and he’ll bite until she teaches him not to. But there will always be the threat of razors to her breast.

Right now, the baby smiles at her like she’s the only person who ever mattered and ever could. And he believes it. But she knows that’ll wane. She sees the thermostats.

And still, heart quaking, the mother kisses her baby goodbye and leaves the house because she can’t hold water in her hands and she’s building to her crone life as much as she’s building her children. Instinctively she understands the difference between a happy crone and a bitter crone is good witch//bad witch.

While she’s away, she gives birth to this little thing here. There are many wombs to tend. Not all turn to raisins.

xx

stages of womanhood by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves