Feel

I’ve thought about writing this for months.  I hit a wall almost instantly, every time.  I banish it from my mind, but it keeps coming back.

I need to put words to this. 

What’s stopping me? 

Perhaps it’s not knowing which parts of this story are mine to tell, and which ought to be left to my son to tell someday, in the manner of his choosing. 

There are some loaded words swirling around us, and I don’t know how much power to give them.  They’re words I’ve been afraid to say out loud.  Words that jar me to see in print. 

Labels. 

Labels applied to other people and their children—never to me and mine. 

What does a label do?  How long will it stick?  And who has the right to apply it?  

It feels like drawing a box around my child—something I’ve never wanted to do.  Will it protect him or imprison him?  Will he feel freed or cornered?  The water is murky here.

Experts have flung some words our way.  They’ve changed the way I see my son.  If I tell them to others, they’ll see him differently too. 

But they already do.  So maybe it will help more than hurt.  But I expect there will be some of both.

The chalk is in my hand.  What will I draw for him?  A box?  A word?  A dream?  A path? 

He’s little now.  He cannot read.  But he has ears and eyes.  One little hashtag could connect me with other women who find themselves in this strange land.  I want to help them the only way I know how, which is to say, “I know.  Me too.”   We women are a fountain of strength for each other.  But my little boy...how will seeing that hashtag coupled with his image make him feel five, ten, twenty years from now?

I never knew a mother could feel so helpless until I was that mother.  A mother who wondered how she didn’t know what her child was saying, what he needed, who he was underneath his screams and fists and slamming doors and hurling rocks.

Where are you?

Trapped, your whole life inside your very own skin—skin you cannot feel unless you scratch until there’s blood.

We mothers want our babies’ blood to stay inside, where it belongs. 

But we all need some way to feel.  You need edges how I need softness.  You walk the line I stay away from.  You need impact the way I need solitude.

You seem safest on a rocky cliff.

You need touch like I need words. 

It’s how we know we’re alive. 

So I will fight for you, my son.  Until my last breath.  I will help you to be free, to feel right, to feel home.  I don’t care where it is or what it’s called.  We will find that place together.

The cloak of motherhood

My mother once wrote me a letter.  She told me, “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.” 

Those were not words I would forget. 

At the time, I wept with humility.  The words gave me strength to feign confidence I did not feel.

They were with me when I stepped on a plane with my newborn son to begin a chapter of life that would slice me open.

They were with me when I cradled my five-year-old's limp body as his eyes rolled back and his face gushed blood.

They were with me night after night after night with no daddy-came-home! reprieve.

I may have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace, but there was little easy or graceful about motherhood.  So I gripped those words, squeezed them for one last ounce of strength, day in and day out.  They never ran dry, though I often did.

Her words come back to me now, nine years after their writing, with a new layer of meaning.  I wonder at her use of the word “cloak.”

She used to advise me: “Once you have kids, you always have kids."  "Wait as long as you can before you have kids."  "Once you have kids, you don’t exist anymore.”

Her words look harsh and jaded on the page, but they weren’t delivered that way.  She truly meant them as nothing but a service to me. 

As a new mother, I was determined to prove them false.  As a mother of two I thought I had.  When I hit rock bottom as a mother of four, I slumped my shoulders and admitted defeat. 

She is almost always right, after all.

I didn’t exist anymore.

And yet, employing this cloak imagery, she contradicted herself.  Because a cloak is something you can put on and take off at will.

Surely that couldn’t be the case with motherhood.  Could it? 

When I became a mother, I well understood and expected the sacrifice it would demand, and I paid it willingly.  What I was not the least bit prepared for, however, was how it would change my awareness of my identity. 

When a child is born, so is a mother.  Like a child, she follows her instincts, graceful and stumbling.  Like a child, she may cover her ears, but she’s always listening.

Like a child, she cries. 

Like a child, she grows hour by hour, as some unknown hand distils her life-grappling into fuel.

Like a child, she is beautiful without knowing.  And she came into this world with a self that belongs to her and her alone.

With each child I bear, I shed a skin of selfishness.  What’s underneath is new and pink and raw.  It will toughen over time.  But into what?

Am I my skin?  Or my raw, pink underside?

Or something deeper down than that?  

I am my core, unchangeable.  A girl who finds God in the rustle of leaves.  A girl who sees the one.  A girl who is lifted by lifting, who doesn’t know when to quit.

That’s always been me.  That will always exist.

Everything else is just skin.