Wallflower Writing

Loving children sounds like noise.

It sounds like your tired voice yelling “slow down!” 

And like hurrying little feet, swiftly picking up the pace.

It’s echoes from slammed doors and it’s also roaring belly laughs.

It’s listening to them chew and feeling like…why am I cutting bite size pieces for someone clearly ready to stick their face in this cake?

It sounds like “watch this”, like “I didn’t do it”, and like talking to my therapist.

It sounds like sighs of forgiveness and of defeat; we’re all just doing the best we can.

It’s thinking you’re about to take an unsupervised bathroom break and hearing that little knock.

It’s after school attitude, steamin’ like a freight train.

It sounds like a personal narrator- in case you weren’t an active participant in your life.

Loving children means loud, unintentional, misfiring noise.

It’s spontaneous and unidentifiable signals that half of us literally don’t even understand.

It’s listening to how fast the clock ticks; the minutes ticking, the weeks ticking… the handful of remaining days in this decade…ticking.

It’s finding a rhythm in the chaos, and dancing with the sound. 

It is a symphony and you are it’s conductor.

The volume.

The tempo.

The “I’m not tired” tango.

It’s built-in-music to our ears.

We *depend* on it. When you love a child, you learn to embrace the noise. You learn to find the music.

Because when you love children, you really understand that life would be much, much different…if it were quiet.

She is the person who knows all about the ways my heart has been broken. 

She is the one who knows all the ways it is surely bound to break again. 

She is the unbreakable bond you feel when you trust me, the cumulative lessons that have made me who I am.

She is the person who wrote history with me and still opens that book, revisits it and takes new insight.

She is the steadfast investment you feel when you’re loved by me, a familiar embrace that has shifted and shaped my depth of lovin’.

She is the person I clung to when I searched for my identity as an individual, the one who wasn’t sour when I claimed it.

She is the person who wades with me in the pits of grief, who grabs tightly my hand in the shallows and makes me promise to hold on.

She is who comes when you open your heart to the way you deserve to be loved.

When you are convinced by me that there is still good in this world – it is because I was convinced by her.

It’s never an easy question, although it is a reoccurring one.

 “Momma, who’s your mommy?”

I thought I had more time before the consciousness of disparity, to sort out some truths bound to my estranged mother.

But, here we are with my 4 year old and some hard-hitting questions.

A million things crossed my mind, as I tried not to face the question. 

She didn’t want us.

She left us behind.

She broke me-

and never came back.

But, that’s not what I say. 

Instead, I teach her about safety in priorities, and that it’s ok to seek out comfortable situations, while avoiding consistently hurtful people. 

No matter who those people are.

I teach her that you’re not a product of where you came from or how people treat you.

But you are absolutely a product of how hard you work and what you come to offer to the world.

I help her appreciate that she has choices too, and that one day she will understand the reasoning for many of mine.

I teach her that her mommy loves her and that no matter the chaos that ensues over a lifetime – mommy will never leave. 

So, when she asked me “who’s your mommy

?”, instead of saying what I wanted to say, I told her my mother’s name.

Because no matter how bad I feel inside about it, I know that I am stronger in my convictions because of it.

I will never do as I was taught.

I will never cheat my child from something as essential as a mother’s love – even while I continue to grieve for the love of my own.

I’m someone’s mom.

I’m a grocery clerk scanning eggs.

I’m the fast paced mail lady, trying to get my kid off the bus on time.

I’m a built-in alarm clock.

A walking calendar.

A personal escort to the potty.

A sounding bar when their father doesn’t understand them. When they don’t even understand themselves.

I’m the venti-vanilla-latte-drinking blonde at Starbucks getting work done before school pick-ups.

I’m the call they made the first time their heart was broken. The first time they were bullied.

I’m who wiped their butts and the one who knows about what happened in the bathroom that day.

I’m a catalog of embarrassing moments, triumphs, of secrets – a vault.

I never will tell about what happened in the bathroom that day.

I’m who taught them how to use a spoon.

I’m the lady who looks like them and demands they brush their teeth.

I’m someone’s emergency call.

Their first choice.

The one who drops it all for them.

Someone’s tunnel vision.

I’m everywhere; I’m half the women you know. I am guidance and refuge.

I do all these things and more.

I am learning as I go.

And teaching as I am taught.

I am all the things I never even knew I needed for myself. Because I’m someone’s mom.

Losing loved ones makes you think a lot.

There are people we will have to live without that will always make us wonder:

Could I have loved you better?

Could I have tried harder?

Could I have said it differently?

Done things….differently?

But you can’t.

Because you only get this life – 

Right here, right now.

The thing is, none of us stay forever.

It’s not up to you who stays or who goes.

Just like you don’t get an entire choice loving the ones you end up with. 

You make it work and you work for it. Until the very bitter end, whenever that may be.

So celebrate life like they’re still here with you and while they are still here, love them like they’ll never leave.

It’s up to you to love your people and your life – Right here, right now.

“You should smile more”. 

I don’t know why some men say that. It’s 2020 and we, as women, have a lot to be upset about.

We’re used to zipping our lips, sitting pretty and following the rules; a silent gender in a silent contract, until the rise of the #metoo generation.

We’re responding to the demands of raising children and simultaneously shattering glass ceilings like it’s easy work that we’re fairly compensated for- and they want us to smile some more.

Old grievances have no ending date or ending shame and we live with that. But, maybe we would smile more if we, as women, didn’t soley hold that systematic weight.

At the end of our lives we begin to sort out our justice because we’re aware of the limited time we have left to tell our truth- and  women are arriving to their truths, with fewer smiles than ever.

We are watching. 

We are rising up and speaking out. 

Let me be the first to tell you, it’s hard to smile when you’re mad as hell at a system that is inherently flawed.

We’re understanding now, that the impact of our silence lays on the backs of our children, of our daughters- as it too, has been laid on us.

But, I won’t raise my daughter in a world where she is playing catch up for the things she could not say- for the things our mothers and grandmothers could not say.

I will raise her to speak now and nobody will ask her twice or dare direct the features on her face upwards, because she will already be grinning.

Because she is being raised by a generation of women who persist towards a world where dignity is stitched tightly into the fabric of its infrastructure.

Women who will continue to lead our mothers and grandmothers out of the darkness and our children into a future that is fair.

Where the truth is here, now and most importantly: it is spoken.

Before you command a woman to smile more, I ask you first to evaluate the world they are walking through and the fire they are carrying.

Then, with a smile stretched out between my ears- I challenge you to adjust your part in it. 

It hit me today watching my bare butt toddler hurrying up the stairs.

Someday I’ll never see that little bare butt walking around my house again, because one day it won’t be so little.

Someday there will be boundaries not even mom can break through, wounds I cannot heal.

Someday I’ll miss the freedom of kissing her anytime I want, having a built-in snuggle buddy.

Someday when the nest is empty and she’s gone and moving on, I’ll have to learn to let her go.

I’ll be left with only the hope that I did my due diligence as her mother.

Someday she’s going to grow up and be more herself and become a little less “mine”.

Someday I will have to hand her over to this great big, wild world.

It hit me hard watching that little bum leave me at the bottom of the stairs.

You never really know when it’s going to be the last time you watch it walk away unclothed or unafraid.

I know I will never get these moments back when my child is little and largely untouched, unscathed by reality and it’s experiences.

I know right now she doesn’t understand why I take these moments to sit back and take it in, why I’m always clicking pictures… 

But someday, when I’m up to my eyeballs in grandchildren and there are little bare butts too fast for me to catch…

I’ll thank my child for giving me the most precious and cherished times of my life.

And I just know, she will thank me back.

“I gave up my career to do this” I would always say. To do this thankless job, in this thankless society.

Now, I wake up and bring my only baby to school and pick her up 8 hours later.

I used to be able to name every snack, heal every ache and thoughtfully calculate her every move.

Now I pick her up and she’s begging to eat, we’re both tired and exhausted. She tried fish sticks at school. I didn’t even know that.

I can feel her slipping away.

She’s getting bigger in ways I thought would creep in, but instead came cascading.

She wants to know about why people die, she wants to talk about life.

She’s insightful, but also often reminds me that we are all going to be okay.

She tells me when she’s impressed, disappointed and exhausted.

She tells me when I’m wrong and she remembers everything she hears.

I get this pagne in my chest like I can feel her slipping away.

But maybe, I hope she’s slipping to a place where I don’t have to teach her what to think; she just thinks it.

A place where she doesn’t pick the flowers, she grows them.

To a place where I don’t have to show her how to form an opinion because she doesn’t need me for that; she has her own.

To a place where she leads me, instead of a place where she is being led to.

To the very place we’re all meant to slip through before we’re jaded by life and society’s hardening, a place that we forget.

A place that only children can lead us back to.

It’s not the same. Domestic duties have doubled, so has the bickering.

The spare time we used to cash in on live music and overnight trips we now spend crunching finances and wishing we could sleep.

We used to meet on lunch breaks, we couldn’t wait all day to see each other. Now our time is divided.

Spread between play-dates, working, planners, realizing maybe it’s time to optimize a healthier dieting situation, and also repeatedly failing to make the time to do that.

It’s not the same. Somehow it’s easier, more comfortable, complete.Now, we have a system.

You haul, wash, and dry the laundry and I spend the week folding and putting it away.

We communicate without words and laugh off misunderstandings that used to make me worry.

You depend on me to hold down the fort at 9 am, I depend on you to save the day by 5 o’clock.

You are our pillar of strength, I am our loving arms.

We work tirelessly to do the most important job in the world, and we do it together.

I’ve loved every version of you that I’ve known, but watching you be a dad is by far my favorite.

The highs and lows of life may change and age us, but the beauty of parenting this child together will always embrace us.

It’s true, it’s really not the same.

It’s so much better.

I talk about the fast forward button in life more than I am proud to admit.

To a still-screen shot when my daughter is school aged, emotionally well-adjusted, the house is orderly, and dinner is planned for the week.

But it’s times like these that slow me down.

When this charming, tiny, green-eyed girl that I gave to this world asks me to literally stop and smell the flowers.
I never stopped before her. I never took it all in… until now.

I remind myself that soon, I’ll be a full-time working mom and she’ll be going to kindergarten.

She’ll come home with homework, the house will be orderly, the meal plans will be executed with care and I will be aching for those days we could walk, laugh, and smell the flowers together.

So I pay my respect to the pause button and take in every moment of her being little, just a little longer.