Right Now

To be fair, I'm sure that no one really knows how to do this, especially the first time.  You would have to understand time enough to split a moment open and peer inside.  You would have to have already wrangled your wild self.  Broken it in.  Made it soft and pliable and you would have to have armor enough to guard against every breeze that threatened to harden it back to feral.

  There are women who have wanted this forever.  This thing that I have.  This thing that I am.  But the universe has a sense of humor, and though I fancied myself a great number of things, I never did think that housewife would be among them.  It's not among them.  Despite the fact that this is what I'm doing, this is not who I am.  And if I take the narcissism out of it, I would have to assume that this isn't who most of us really are.

  How do we hold onto ourselves?  How, when we don't own a single one of our own minutes, do we find the time to look in a mirror and remember why we have scars?

When you're a stay at home mom, it can be quite easy to stop existing entirely.  If you're not careful, you melt into whatever wall you're next to, or whatever chair you're sitting in.  You match the hum of the refrigerator like breath and you become what you are doing and lose track of what size jeans you wear, and the city you loved grows like tall grass and you get lost where you once felt at home.  Home becomes a life that would have bewildered you not even that long ago.

It is a cliche to say that none of it matters, but I don't need to qualify any of this.  I understand my privilege here.  I won't cave to the itch at the base of my skull telling me to gush and scream and flood that I love my daughter and I am lucky to have this life (though I suppose I just did, didn't I?).  No.  I need for this to be mine.  Something has to be mine without the nearly Catholic guilt that accompanies being a mother and still, shamefully, being a human being.

When I look back at this time in my life, it will shimmer like soap bubbles.  It is magic, all of it.  I will remember the first time I heard her giggle.  I will remember what it was like the moment we found out she was ticklish, and the moment I made the grave, trust-crushing mistake of giving her spinach.  I will remember crying when we began giving her formula, and crying as I packed up the clothes that she managed to outgrow in what felt like a day, and crying when she got a bump on her head because I turned my back for thirty seconds.  I've got videos and pictures of these events just in case my memory ever takes on sepia tones.  I will not forget her.  But there is only space for so much there, and the bare truth is that when I look back on this time in my life, I will only remember being her mother.  Right now, I am only her mother.