Wake Up

I've been very emotional about motherhood lately, and I don’t mean emotional as in stomping up and down like a mad woman, screaming, “SOMEONE LISTEN TO ME!”

No.  I am a different kind of emotional.

It is almost like heartache.  It is grieving for time passed,

but it is like I just found out it passed.

I grieve not for the time I spent as a child or as a young adult. 

I am talking about the time that has passed as a mother of young children, and I am not referring to big chunks of time.  I am talking about seconds. 

I mourn seconds passed; seconds missed; seconds wasted; seconds ruined; seconds hoarded selfishly (that’s a big one…those would add up to days). 

It’s that whole “Turn around and you’re two…Turn around and you’re four…” song, but it is played while a mother walks past a hurting child without stopping, indifferently calling back something like, “You’re fine.”  The song plays while a mother sits and reads in one room, while a child sits alone and reads in another…just a few moments after the child has asked the mom to read to him.

It is looking in the mirror, seeing your face, knowing your age, and recognizing you have NO idea how you got to this age so quickly.

Gosh.  That sounds SO cliché.  I am not so special after all.  I live clichés.  Please go tell 25 year-old me that – turns out - I am not so special after all.

I can remember being younger and older people bleeding that very line, “I look in the mirror and have no idea how I got so old.”  Seriously, they’d say it like they were cut; hurt; in pain; and confused...really really confused.  They bled that line.

What’s more - I remember being young enough when I heard it that I wasn't able to experience even a drop of empathy.  I was all like, “Well.  Yep.  You’re old.”  

I might have even had a deeper, more distant thought (we keep unreasonable thoughts at a distance), and that thought was “That won’t happen to me.”  Could I have had an illogical thought like that?  I think I DID.

Empathy waits for you.  It stands back and does a Father of the Prodigal Son on you.  With your head down, you come walking home to empathy one day. 

I feel those people now.   

Aging is not for a select few.  We all have to learn to age. 

Up until now, I aged mindlessly.

Today, I am telling you – 

I want to learn how to age. 

Because – when you are in that mirror - what’s next is the realization that - in much less time than it took you to age into that reflection - your children will not have the same look in their eye.

What look?

The look…

it says a thousand things at once:  I am scared; I am confused; I don’t know how to help myself; I don’t know how to ask you to help me; I don’t know what I feel; I feel so much; I don’t know what I don’t know; I don’t know how to stop; I don’t know where to start; I don’t know how to cry; I don’t know how not to cry; I don’t want to need you; I hate needing you; I love you so much that I cannot breathe….

There is seldom a moment that your child does not have that look.

Or, if you have ignored “the look” enough, maybe your child just looks down.

Lift his head, and – yep – it’s still there.

And – yet – I often dodge that look.  I DODGE IT!  I duck and hide from it some days or FOR days. 

Sometimes, I read that look as “work.”

What am I saying…I OFTEN read that look as work.

What work?

The work of feeling THEM, instead of feeling ME.  I could paint a million scenarios, because these are wee little infinitesimal examples of my staying locked inside my body, instead of going back out there and doing something else...and then something else...and then something else...and then something else....

It is like the “sin of omission,” the failure to do something one can and ought to do. 

Do you walk past your children, and you have a thought, but you are too exhausted – not physically, but more like psychologically – to say what you think.

And, I am not just talking about saying something corrective or instructive.  That is an entirely different discussion…I think we have all ignored some bad behavior in a moment when we were just too worn-out to deal with it. 

NO, I am talking more about seeing your daughter’s hair, and thinking, “It is shining,” but you don’t tell her so. I am talking about your son having grabbed a snack, but he is being so careful not to get a crumb on the floor, and you are amazed, but you don’t say so.  I am talking about feeling SO MUCH LOVE when your daughter crawls out of bed and comes down the hallway that you want to hold her on your lap and wrap your arms around her, but you don’t do it…because you are – “in the middle of something.”

Sometimes, you are just in the…

Middle of Yourself.

Stuck there.

I do the same thing over and over instead of saying, “You are shining.”  Or “You are amazing.”  Or “You are loved.”

And it is nothing to write home about.

Because – I do NOTHING.

Instead of changing a life with words or small deeds, I am sitting there or standing there,

TIRED.

I am kinda numbed out.

I am kinda not firing on all cylinders.

I am kinda thinking, “I should,” but I am too exhausted to act.

I am kinda shut down.

I am “kinda.”

How absolutely unextraordinary of me.

I have my whole life to be tired.

Today…right now…every day should be like a marathon, where I throw my body across the line at the end – because it was that important.  What would someone say to you in a marathon – they would say, “This is no time to be tired.”

I think, for the most part, we moms make allowances for ourselves…we say we will do better tomorrow.  But, after a bunch of tomorrows, you don’t see the progress in yourself for which you had been hoping, and a year is gone. 

NOT GETTING IT BACK.

A few days ago, I came across a picture of Pixie when she was three years old.  Pixie is now 6.  I looked at her in the photo, her chubby cheeks; her gorgeous red-hair cut in a precious bob; her kind eyes, and her plump arms poking out her baby blue sundress,

and I missed that little girl so so so so very much that I suddenly began to cry…tears came, completely out of nowhere.  I hurt. 

She was sitting in the next room.

I got up from my desk, where I was viewing these pictures, and I found Pixie on the couch in the living room. 

I looked at her intentionally, perhaps for the first time in a long time.  Pixie’s cheeks are no longer chubby, her hair now long and flowing –just like she always wanted it to be; her eyes still kind but more knowing, and her little arms now long, slender and graceful. 

I rubbed away my tears, and I slowly, fully present, all senses alive, sat down beside her, and I leaned my head on her shoulder. I took a psychological breath from the depths of my soul, a breath that wanted to suck us out of the room and into a bubble.  She was playing on her tablet, and she didn't look up or look at me.  She simply leaned her head into mine in the way that only Pixie would.  The feeling I had when she acknowledged me was so overwhelming.  How could I ever brush her aside?  How could I ever be too tired?  How could I ever need more of ME and less of Pixie. 

I know I will always remember that moment.

And there are so many moments like that to be had.  I am surrounded by moments to be had.

Lately, I cannot successfully brush it aside when I miss out on those moments – it comes back quickly. When I push “the moment” away, and I ignore “the look,” and I walk along, silent or busy, almost resenting my busyness…always saying "I am doing the best I CAN!"

The face in the mirror reminds me, “Are you sure?” 

I think I am learning how to age.

I don’t think aging would be half as surprising, half as shocking,

if I stayed conscious while it was happening.