I see you there.
Aching with tired and the
desperate hope for a few moments alone this evening. I see you cleaning that carpet again. I see
those dishes that are on a constant rinse and repeat cycle.
I see you settle down and get
up and settle down and get up and settle down and get up a hundred times before
10pm.
I see you wondering where the
melody is in this repetitive rhythm of motherhood.
I see you making lunches and
trying to reinvent new ways to cook chicken. I see your relief at the one box
of mac ‘n cheese left in the pantry and that pears can always pass as the
“fruit and vegetable “serving in a pinch.
I see you building forts and
chasing kids who are chasing puppies.
I see you talking to the
neighbor over the fence and only realizing 10 minutes into the conversation
that you’d clipped your bangs up at a crazy angle and you try to pull out the
barrette hoping she wouldn’t have noticed.
I see you measuring your day in
inches as the years stretch ahead in long miles.
I see you step on that scale
and sigh off it again and swing baby to the hip juggling milk and bottle and
pacifier in the slow dance toward the afternoon nap.
I see you juggle temper
tantrums – sometimes your own.
I see you walk miles of school
drops offs and pick-ups and all the conversations in between with your own head
and its running list of what you should-have-done different every day.
I see you stand next to all
those other moms and wonder if they wonder in the middle of the night if
Kindergarten parent-teacher
conferences should really be this intimidating.
And sometimes I see you sit
there and stare into space and wait to find the meaning in it all.
For the days that you don’t. For the days that someone demands another
glass of chocolate milk or someone else needs to be changed first. For the days when the dryer buzzes before you
finish your thoughts.
For those days, can I offer a
different ending?
Can I slip in and change up
where you’re headed in your head?
Because, here’s the thing.
You are the change.
You are the difference.
You are the art emerging from
the hunk of dull marble.
You are the deeper meaning
you’re looking for.
You are becoming a mother. And
mothers are made not born.
Slowly. Like the pencil etchings on a door frame
measuring inch by steady new inch of height. You are growing into a deeper version
of yourself.
Some pain is to be expected.
But the good kind. The kind that comes with resetting broken
limbs. Or carving away decay. Or
chipping out the stone for the art that lies buried beneath.
You are not simply existing on
a hamster wheel of sameness.
You are becoming.
Each load of laundry. Each
dinner. Each boo-boo kissed and
nightmare soothed. Each hour of “me” time traded for “family.” Each new
wrinkle, each gray hair, each restless afternoon spent trying to make sense of
a six-year-olds world.
You are all these grooves
chiseled onto a door frame.
Growing can be slow going.
