Mother
Woke up at 5:30am crying. It had been twelve hours since the last time. It was right after walking my dog in the nearby park where I leaned on the fence watching a beautifully androgynous kid dressed in wool poncho, mismatching neon crocs and plaid bell bottoms play in the mulch - did I think that could be mine and isn’t.
Did I ever tell you, sometimes I go to parks just to watch kids. That time stops when their wonder never ends. Did you know I see myself in them more honestly than any mirror.
This was before I went to meet new friends. People that have welcomed me into their 6 year plus crew-ship. The kind of friends with group chats, the kind that’s always there, that sees each other every week, goes to bars with their kids napping in strollers. Another world from my gypsy position moving as a single between many different types of people and groups of friends that would never know each other. Something I thrived on leaving a group to go out on my own and mingle with a whole other kind of person, sober.
Now, in a different time in my life, I wonder what I have to show for it. At a bar with roller skates, VHS on the shelf, arcade in the back, fundip in the front, I sat on a stool next to another 90s kid turned dad, tenured at a university with a two year old spinning to the green neon dots on the dance floor as we celebrate a pregnant friend’s last birthday pre motherhood.
Twenty three days before my 34th birthday, it hit me. This was the life I didn’t choose. (Yet). How pridefully stubborn I wore my independence and non-track track like a tiara. Now I sit on the other side of the looking glass like a kid at the aquarium wondering if I too can swim with the fish.
In the desert of Southern Spain summer of 2019, pre-COVID, pre-another break-up, I contemplated what it means to be woman, to be mother, and if I should have children. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and 7 other female authors sat on my altar and spoke to me in ways that sometimes only the silence of Nature can fully illuminate.
At dusk every evening, the holy hour, I meandered in our neighborhood. One time, lifted by the pink and orange glow of the setting sun, I cascaded while rooted in the dusty soil to two white horses. We both moved as gradual and incremental as time. Time not as clocked capitalism. No. Time as a delicate distinction of each movement layering into a continuous momentum of flow. The sun became friends with the moon and it wasn’t until the darkness beckoned poetry, did I make my way back to that temporary home below the white humming ceiling fan and in front of the altar. Sitting at the desk, without question or thinking, simple sentiment moved from my hand to the page unexpectedly. She speaks below.
Did I come from Mother
Or did I come from Nature
And what do I do from here?
I look at the Full Moon
And see Grandmother Smiling
-
Are we all meant to Birth something?
I don’t know if I am going to have children
But I know I’m a Mother
-
It’s somewhere in between that you feel her.
There’s chatter.
But everything is Quiet.
-
She breaths
She weeps
She laughs
She sleeps
Her
name
is
Mujer
Salvaje
-
I’m afraid that the moment in the desert is the halo and the rage within me won’t have the patience to raise any thing other than a dog. I’m afraid that someone I can’t escape will reflect my own imperfection. I’m afraid that the world I want isn’t what exists and the serenity prayer is the only thing that makes sense. I’m afraid we won’t turn our sinking titanic around soon enough before the melting icebergs buoy our infrastructure. I’m afraid I’m not doing enough. I’m afraid I’m not enough. I’m afraid to bring someone else into this not enough equation.
And then I see a child in real life. Not just my head talking in circles. Anxieties melt into awe. Like a pink setting sun that kisses every surface, children remind you Beauty, without our control, exists anyways.
I recently learned about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics that says we can calculate where something is in the present moment but can’t at the same time know it’s momentum. And what a metaphor, that we can’t simultaneously know an objects current position and exact trajectory, so I share it with my new friends. And the soon to be dad says next to me, that’s kind of like the observer effect in quantum mechanics, where the act of observation itself can change the measured results. So I sit with these two principles as poetry.
Every thought is paused
With dusk’s softness
Her golden grass whispers
“Do nothing my dear’
And it will be okay
Because being means there already is another
Photo: alisonleephotography, white horses in castilblanco de los arroyos, Spain