I had always thought there’d be more time.
I had thought when they swaddled you in that cotton blanket in the heat of mid-May, that it’d take a whole lifetime to unwrap you a man and I couldn’t imagine, me but a child.
Who knew a lifetime was a blink and you’d be so tall when I next turned around, son, your cow-lick still turning there?
That is what I kept tracing when they handed you over, all bundled and waiting.
Just tracing that one perfect swirl of hair on your smooth perfect forehead.
And it’s the years that’d make me dizzy, me circling around again and again, lost, tripping over the lost shoes, never finding the lost books, all my lost looks, and nothing perfect in me, and you growing too fast. Would it have all slowed it down, if I had held you more?
After the sweet dripping milk, then the tears in silent saltiness that I brushed away with the back of my hand. How nothing could contain you, the way your one wild mind worked, and how my singular heart still lived in small, tight places, but there was still all that running space of prayers, and we did give you this. I only ache that we didn’t give you more. I would tell that young girl that: pray more. Time spent on knees is always time best spent and what else turns all the universe and our stiff hearts?
Now you taller than me, you lean at the counter by the stove, me still bent and stirring, and you ask me about university and how to start farming and if I think yaks are a good business plan or a restaurant in town or taking a year to make furniture with the Mennonites. Then you leave with your father for the field, you who have become a walking dream, and I find this waking wondrous and painful.
It comes down to this:
The son births first and he grows, the woman still an infant mother.
And all the raising of the boy, this is her long labor, and she has to remember to breathe.
And it’s only after a whole score of years that she delivers into true motherhood, when her son leans down and kisses her forehead gentle. This is her full-term day. She only wishes it came sooner, at the beginning, when he first came.
It takes all the years of making a boy into a man — to teach a woman how to be a mother.
Do you know how wild this makes me?
It is hard and I have cried hard. And how I’d give anything for the woman I am now to be the girl who ran her trembling finger along that whorl of you. To birth mother-wisdom is a twenty-year gestation, and it’s the child who patiently raises the girl into a real woman and why is life always lived best backwards? All those endless nights in the halo of thrifted lamp light, you squalling loud and me weakly swaying all your flailing fury, I never knew it be you who’d rock me for decades in this forgiving patience. Haven’t we been a pair? There is no cutting of the cord, you know.
It makes no sense and makes sense of everything, this love for you, child our together love chose, and to be a mother, this is the rarest gift in the world. Forbid, that we just have children and that is all — when everyday offers the unwrapping of wondrous, holy grace. You catch me at the breakfast table , now and then, these days, days before the calendar and another of your birthdays, me wiping it away with the back of my hand.
“There’s still time, Mom. We’ve still got time.” You tell me this, your hand just a moment on my back, a steadying. You help me believe. Help me believe and unwrap the miracle of here and now.
Somedays you turn again and there it is again, how we once were, one, how I’d hold you and you’d meld into my shoulder, damp and drowsy.
How when I’d fall asleep, you’d too close your eyes…
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Practical helps for Mama’s posted tomorrow, a Mother’s Day Gift for us in the beautiful trenches together
