A Four-Part study of motherhood in things

May 2019 (Read at More Than a Mother reading)

1.   The shape of motherhood:

If I doodle motherhood, I’m tempted to sketch stretching mylar, swollen with helium, puckered mouth tied shut as an umbilicus. A circle or sphere. An object that expands, crowds out and fills a space. Can take your breath away. Push until there is nothing left. Yes, there is the swell of belly then breast, also the previously unknown cavity, the space in my chest that fills and then hardens with a new, ceaseless kind of worry.

But motherhood isn’t all rounded corners, smoothed and stretched surface. Motherhood has jagged places and rough edges that rupture like untended cuticles. Motherhood has sharps. A call from the school nurse, another high fever. Could it be strep again? A crying out during the naptime I needed to write. The jab of the deadline passing. A conversation that starts with “I have a secret that makes my tummy hurt” and ends with my realization that innocence is finite and fleeting if not wholly imaginary. Motherhood can wrap like a limb, feet twitching on two nearly woman-sized pairs of feet as my daughters fall asleep, still asking me to rub their backs. These lives that grew inside of me, and rested for so many hours, stretched across my forearm.

Motherhood can collapse into itself, a singularity, like it did when my brother died, the one-in-four who doesn’t survive his cancer, 18 years after my mother had forgotten how to parent only a daughter. That absence takes up space. It has gobbled decades.

I can’t graph motherhood. The plot points shift as I try to capture them. A compass is no help. I am sloppy with a protractor, too easily distracted chasing these lines to map them. My hand blurs pencil across paper, ink, too, smudging my creation. Erasure is as incomplete as categorization, my acts of motherhood, motherhood’s acts upon me is a new shape not for me to name.

2. Things I have become since becoming a mother: anxious, a Google medical authority on the alpha-one anti-trypsin disorder the pediatrician thought would kill my daughter, a soccer coach, a dangling tooth wiggle extractor, an ex-wife, a teacher, an author, a mountain climber, “the kind of mother who would leave her marriage,” a sister fight mediator, a Sunday morning Belgian waffle chef, a rescue dog mom, tired to the cellular level, a slicer-and-bagger of sticky team orange quarters, one-woman retainer search and rescue squad, a co-parent to varying degrees of success, a carrier of emergency feminine supplies “just in case,” an ultramarathon runner, a girlfriend, a volunteer, a more understanding and patient daughter.

2. Things I have gotten since becoming a mother: loose skin and sagging breasts, an appreciation for the still dark hour of morning spent with a cup of coffee and my notebook, tinnitus in my left ear, a nose ring, more comfortable in my looser skin especially after a breast reduction and lift tethered back to my chest, a sudden allergy to penicillin, a master’s degree, an empty house across town, a literary agent, my last name back, a boyfriend, therapy, a lawn mower, a tree of life and peacock feather tattoo, the confided secrets of my soccer players and their first experiments in profanity, very good and very bad reviews, firsthand experience of addiction fueled violence, a hug from a sleeved policeman standing in my entryway as he says “keep the court date, please,” more therapy, a regular season undefeated record, a sand soccer tournament win, a restraining and protective order, a podium finish, an ally in my daughter’s new stepmother, a menstrual cycle wrenched in sync with my 13 year old, our home’s new alpha female, a deep and abiding fear of social media and the damage young women can inflict upon one another there, a partnership I never expected, comfortable in the evolving shape of my family and what my brand of motherhood looks like.

4. Things I’m Still Not: A room mother, a sister, good at math, a bestseller, particularly patient or tidy, anyone’s wife, confident I’m doing any of this right, scared of losing myself in motherhood.