I carried my 5 year old to the car for as long as I could. I shouted at her that morning- so this was my penance. My left arm was burning more and more with every step, my right arm no help, clutching an open coffee mug for dear life: the one I take from my kitchen, to my car, to school every morning. If muscles could bleed from the inside, mine were. I finally set her down and remembered she could walk. I put her in her car seat and she buckled herself. We went to share a pastry, like we always do after drop off with her older sister; my 7 year old- who holds my face next to hers in the rearview mirror every single morning. She sighs and says “Mommy, we look just alike.” She is the spitting image of her father but I smile and agree.
Dolly eats her pastry. I just pierced her ears the day before and 24 hours starts to look like a whole life. She looks out the window and I look at her. She looks out the window and I look at her. The meditation of my entire being.
I drop her off at pre-school. It’s 9am and it’s already hot out. I feel the summer coming before spring break. She waves goodbye and I remember the first day I left her there.
I can count the days left on my hand, if weeks were days because what is the difference? I hid from other parents as I felt my face contorting in ways reserved for the privacy of my own car and my own car only. Tears streamed down my face so fast- my fingers windshield wiping me to safety. I pulled into my driveway and walked inside, noticing that my left arm was still shaking; a reverberation of motherhood itself. The shaking of your insides from all the moments you put them down, watch them go, still carrying so much.
I layed down in my bed and thought I could stay there all day. Time passes and it passes, so slowly too fast. Another mom called me and asked if I’d get coffee and go on a walk. “Drop off was hell,” she said. I could have kissed her on the mouth. I sat across from her- so thankful, wondering how much time we’d have before Ezer called from the nurse’s office to tell me about a belly ache. 52 minutes.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms. I am so in love with you I could die from it but you won’t let me.
Dolores Wild, I have often wondered about the lesson I am to learn from the universe sending me a child that looks so exactly like me. Sometimes it’s pretty on the nose, the gift of reparenting yourself. To dismiss your harsh thinkings because they have no place near your precious baby. The ruthless annihilating self-criticism silenced by looking into your big brown eyes, a mirror and a time machine. I’ve been in a 5 year arm wrestle with projection, seeing myself v. seeing you. The thing is- the ways you are like me have nothing to do with our carbon copy features. It’s the nerve endings longer than your whole little body. The way you track, and observe, the way you fix. You rub my back like you used to be my mother. I rub your back to remind you I’m yours. I spent so much time tangled up in the ways we are the same, I forgot to notice the way we are different. “She stands up for herself.” I choked on the words and the tears crashed over every groove of my face into my lap so I could hold them in my hands. A small ocean with the lesson written in the sand. “She stands up for herself.” Words I now chew and swallow. Your name came to me like a strike of lightening from the great beyond. It means pain. Life has so much of it, and you notice it all. Pain that is not yours to carry but to transcend. Your middle name is Wild- it means a place without the influence of human activity. It’s the perfect name for you. You like to tell me things through aliens. Last year it was E.T. This year it’s Baby Yoda. I hear you. You are an alien, as if I didn’t already know. But I will always treat you as such. I’m so grateful for your dance on earth with me. Be the force, little one.
For yourself before others. You are the force, sweetheart. Be with us, not for us. Don’t get distracted, I’ll help. I know how to now. Happy birthday my sweet, sweet baby. Five years ago, you alchemized everything. We’re so lucky for it.
I love you so much it is chicken boonanas.
You turning 7 feels like touching a hot stove. The shock so searing and humbling it takes my breath away. Just like the moment I took a pregnancy test that said “yes.” I was listening to Billie Holiday sing “I’ll be seeing you” -the second reason for your middle name. I’d never been so happy about anything in my whole life. My earliest memories of independent play are pretending to give birth, bearing down to a baby doll I would hold so tenderly. Having a C-section felt like ripping my heart out- I was so angry at how my body had forsaken me. I’d only ever asked it to do one thing. Then you were in the NICU, a place where the ringing in your ears takes the shape of a room. Terrified, I’d sit next to you in the incubator, counting the minutes til we could try breastfeeding on our own. I’d squeeze my swollen nipple into your tiny mouth and watch it fall out. Screaming inside, the fear so overwhelming “not this too” I thought. The moment you latched was the quietest moment of all time, all the sound went out. The ecstasy I had imagined of pulling you into this life replaced by the connection of us sustaining it. I learned to trust you. You continue to amaze me everyday- in the ways you are unique and tender, the way you love and witness and express your feelings. When you tell me you didn’t hear me because you were “looking out the window imagining things that haven’t even happened”- I gasp. When I tuck you in for bed and you say “I’m going to cry and I don’t even know the reason” - I tell you to let it out. The other day I yelled and you turned to me gently suggesting that I take a break. I left the room and heard you tell your sister “don’t worry, she just needs a moment to calm her body down.” You met me with your presence and gave me back mine. I am so proud of you, in awe of you, so extraordinarily forgiving of my body because of the way it assembled your cells into being. For doing the one thing I asked. For doing it so perfectly. I am awash with joy at the tether to this planet you have given me, cherishing the steps we take together, trusting each step you take on your own. I love you so truly. I’ll forever be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.
I’ve gotten a beautiful gift the last couple years- women I love becoming mothers. Watching their shoulders drop, their face change and their breathe soften. I have been waiting for them. Waiting for them to join me in this gentle, achey lovingness. To nod my head when they say “what was I even doing before this?”
Mothering remains as joyful and as painful as it always has. Spending my most poignant moments staring at them in the rearview mirror. The risk of missing the turn eclipsed by the risk of missing the way their eyes change on the way to school and on the way home. Watching them stare out the window, their thoughts and dreams that I wish to peer inside of, whispering lyrics to Avril Lavigne songs. My life a merry go round of “how was your day?” Seeing my baby tuck away her pacifier before preschool, my toothless child begging to transition out of her car seat- all while wishing for my own safety harness to grow into. A kaleidoscope of the way things change- no longer jolted awake by a crying baby at 3 am, but the gentle shake of a 6 year old with big worries. Her little body curled up against mine, just like how it all started. A new kind of bad sleep softened by the breathing in of her exhaled dreams.
I have learned that the feelings and the bodies do not grow to scale, the feelings will always outmatch us. My container for them will splinter but we are not made of glass. As mothers we can hold their feelings, we can also connect to them, even when it hurts. Even when your child looks you dead in the face and says they’d be happier somewhere else.
“Tell me about that happiness”
I’ll never forget the way her face changed, and how in that moment my life did too. Mothering is a practice of witnessing all the changes, in our faces and eyes and in our hearts. The permission to design a life of their wildest dreams, their happiness on their own terms. May that happiness be a place I can visit, maybe even one day to find their face changed asking me “what was I even doing before this?” So much. So much.
Happy birthday to the oldest man who has ever lived. I am certain your soul is as surprised to find you in a young and strong body everyday as I am. Lucky for me and the world, you’re here for another go around. I have these very clear images of you constantly floating in my brain, things I’m sure will flash before my eyes in the end but they never go away. Almost as if my brain is saying “I know we left them there but it’ll still be a surprise when you see the way we put them together at the end.” Something about remembering and forgetting and how those two can become the same thing if you don’t look closely enough, or if you don’t stop to listen. When you are about to cry, your lip shakes and I automatically/involuntarily start to cry too. It reminds me of being a child, when I saw my mother cry, when my antennae’s were pulled to frequencies no one else was feeling. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to stop that sort of bleeding, only to find it wasn’t blood at all: it was just love. A hard wire to feel and see the world for what it was, to know pain and joy and feel it as my own. To feel life pass through me like a tidal wave. I never met anyone like me until I met you. How gentle and precious to be understood. How earth shattering and life affirming to stand next to someone and know they are feeling the same thing. I really love it when you are loud and moving. When you are dancing and silly. When you see things I can’t. But I especially love when you are still. When I see you and think “like a duck in the water.” I love to know who you are and to be close to it. Thank you for letting me big and small and messy and anxious, and loving and true. It has saved my life. Thank you for showing me things I don’t want to live without- like Jersey mikes, The Cheesecake Factory, and luka doncic and for showing me things I can’t- like being read to, being held and being seen. You are other worldly and so important, leaving an indelible mark on everything you touch. Steering your antennas towards grace and healing and the secret things we all have always known. You are my ghost. I love you.
Hal & Harper made its first step out into the world at Sundance and I could just cry about it forever. I cried almost entirely through our screening because we just really worked so hard to get this thing done and in front of people. This show is meant to be seen by so many people and for the first time it was and it had exactly the moving, powerful, hopeful impact I’ve always known it would. Falling in love with the script, its creator and every person who helped bring the show to life has brought me so much joy, transformation and healing and I’m just so grateful. So grateful for cooper’s brain for having all the deepest most knowing most truly important things tucked inside and for getting them out on the page. So grateful for the feeling I had reading it for the first time and for the true honor to witness it. I’ve never seen actors show up and go so hard like these guys did and I have never seen someone pour so much of their heart, soul, and body and be so unrelenting in the perfecting of every frame as Cooper has here. The show captures something so intangible and so desperately needed by us all, not just the pain of life and letting go but the inexplicable pain we forgot we remembered. It lets all of us go back in time and see our little selves and whisper to them sweetly everything’s gonna be okay ❤️
Today you turn 4. I’m instantly called to the first time I held you in my arms, a feeling rushed with so much joy and such relief, I’ll never get over it. I often joke about the little ways you out yourself on your many lives here before us- cupping your hand over your mouth to smell your own breath, saying “now her voice will be different” when your sister lost her first tooth. Looking over at me at a party and saying “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I have never been so stunned by a person so completely so all of the time. When you were 2 months old I played Chopin in our newborn haze, your lip was downturned quivering and your eyes filled with tears. A genius, I thought. But what I have learned in these last 4 years is that you are holding a wisdom that most of us are just beginning to touch. A memory, I know. Your laugh takes up your whole body and your whole body moves like it’s 10x heavier than it actually is. You remind me of my mother, and my mother of me; a healing conduit of time travel for us both. You don’t like it when it’s loud and often “feel shy of people”. You always want to go home and always want to sleep in. You are always hungry for something yummy and you always want to snuggle. This summer we went to a water park and on the lazy river holding me tightly as the warm water carried us gently, round and round- you looked at me and we spoke telepathically as we often do. You said “do you remember?” I said “yes of course I do.” You said “let’s stay forever” I said “baby this is what remembering is for” I have spent a lot of time watching you be wary of the world, building a hard shell for your delicate center but these last few weeks I have seen you crack open. An entirely new version of the joy/relief for me to unpack. When we got out of the lazy river I wrapped you up in a towel and held you in my arms (the best way to get a glimpse of your newborn baby while they are in toddler form) and I swear on your life and all things holy in this world- you looked up at me and said “E.T. phone home.” Well, my little extra terrestrial, this big scary world has called on you again and I think you must be here to change it. I love you infinitely.
Today you’re 6. This is the closest in age we have ever been because I remember 6 so well. I remember my first crush, I remember sunsets and ice cream. I remember liking the feeling of some clothes & hating others- a conundrum that obliterates both our nervous systems most mornings at this time. I remember watching my mom in a sea of other moms after kindergarten and wondering if I had the choice would I still pick her. I always did. I remember all the knots of pain in my life still being loose ends. I remember already wishing for you. You’re 6 but you’re the smartest person I know. You’re 6 but you communicate your feelings with gobsmacking clarity- you know what is precious and true. You’re 6 but I can still carry you from school to the car. You still have 19 baby teeth, just one missing (a right hook from time that could well, knock your teeth out.) You’re 6 but you are a wise and gentle healer. I had this vision of you recently, you were a mermaid and I was looking at you through a pane of glass- seated on a bench of an aquarium looking up at the constellation of your big little life. It was the first time I really realized our separateness. You were glorious and fully realized- breathing underwater without me. The metaphor so poignant because among the many things I’m yet to learn at 33, I still can’t swim. When you tell me you can’t sleep at night, we do this ritual where I have you tap your shoulders and say “I’m here, I’m safe, I’m safe in my body, I’m safe with myself.” I assure you that I am near, that I always will be. God, what a different life if someone had told me I was safe with myself. But maybe it takes sitting on a bench in a dream-state seeing your baby breathe underwater to realize we all just belong to ourselves. Ezer, my wish for you is that you stay there waving through the glass and that you always move away from those who refuse to see you so clearly. Hearing you say it back to me “I’m here, I’m safe, I’m safe in my body, I’m safe with myself” has given me a set of loose ends I thought I’d never get back. Happy birthday my baby. You are forever the realization of my truest dream. I love you the most.
For the most part, I think I’m a good mom. I witness them, they’re clean and fed and happy-and when they’re not- I try to imagine myself as a polymorphous energy of stillness and compassion- I love them to the ends of the earth. Yet, sometimes mothering feels like my 5 year old and I taking turns shouting “I’m feeling overwhelmed!” -her new favorite phrase and my most regular feeling. I hate how scared they get when my voice gets loud. I hate it when my voice gets loud. I hate remembering the feeling and I hate bringing it on to them. I even hate scooping them up afterward and saying I’m sorry. But I love what happens in my body when I hold them and hold myself. I love that the second after I do, I hold my own mother and every mother I know. God, I spend so much time thinking about my own Mom, wishing I could go back in time and seep into her all the grace and love and gentleness this world has to offer. Wishing that in the endless shapes and voids of parallel universes-my children and my mom and my dad could seep into me the same. Feeling endlessly frustrated that it takes lifetimes not lives to endure the exquisite imbalance of pain and healing. I spend so much time thinking about what I get wrong, almost no time thinking about what I got right and tucked inside all regular adult human thoughts- “in this moment- I wonder what they’re feeling.” I’m learning to untangle on my days without them, how to feel the sun on my face, how to see straight upside down and walk without limbs etc, still automatically waking up for sleep regressions they’ve long since outgrown. Still feeling the urge to watch their chest rise and fall three times before I can fall back asleep. Still feeling myself as a child wanting to scream with the unbridled anguish that my children do. The other day when she did, she turned to me and said “Mama, I just need extra care” and that’s the proudest moment I’ve ever felt as a mother. That’s the only “got it right” feeling that cast a shadow long enough for me to see clearly. So, Moms- today I wish for you the voice to say “I just need extra care,” and I wish for you someone to receive it. I also wish for you to watch Bluey- s2 ep 26. 🫶
