Yes, it’s a new year,
but it has been a worn-thin last couple of days.
Keep going,
keep doing,
act like I can handle everything.
So many emails from the school,
jolting along in a covid test pick-up lane,
hearing, “What’s the name of your student?”
My mind drifted to keeping them home forever as I heard myself say both the high schooler’s names.
Christmas got stripped down to the hardwood.
Once again I put all the cheerful things away,
and I took a deep breath looking forward into a calendar that had far too much of an echo.
Far too much nothing for my taste.
Today I turned around in the car and it was like the pit of my stomach felt my 14 year old daughter Chloe’s face.
She said she didn’t feel well,
but I knew, because I feel it too:
The ill-feeling came from a strictly emotional place.
She’s worried,
she’s too crowded at school,
she’s holding her breath because of much more than one thing,
so I asked her if she thought maybe tomorrow she should just stay home,
and have some time to breathe, and be.
When we welcome our own selves, after all,
it’s always worth the wait.
I’m trying to help her learn this at such a crucial age.
I told her I see her.
I know that her days have been filled with so many “have to do”s, and she isn’t a fortress.
She just isn’t built that way.
Her eyes filled with tears as I promised to let her have a day where she isn’t asked to do one single thing.
Not asked to reach for something,
or be something;
Not asked to even grab, or to help to clean a random thing.
She whispered a cracked “Thank you,”
and I hoped my eye contact told her I more than understood the need, because,
Oh, to have someone give me nothing but sun and breeze…
Oh to have someone give me the same space…
Later, I found my 13 year old, Tessa, crying in her room, her needs opposite of Chloe’s.
She is not needing dormant.
She is needing bloom.
(Sometimes the same two pigments, like children, when blended differently,
make up a whole different hue)
Tessa cried for worry that her friend time would be lost again with this new variant.
She spent so many years longing for it,
seeking it out, striving;
She can’t even bear to lose it again.
I perched on her bed and told her, as I stroked her head,
“I know that feeling like you had no one was your deepest wound.
I see that you finally have a thing you feel panicked to not be there for.
You feel panicked to lose.”
Now tears from a second girl.
A second wildly-flung hug.
I noticed how their two bodies clung to me, so specific to each one.
Each child weighs different on you forever.
They do from the beginning;
Even from the very first time they are placed on you…
Later I’d snap at my youngest, Paige, as I lay in bed with her, telling her that her wiggling was enough already.
She then turned to face the wall.
Now I had made HER cry,
A different kind of tears that suddenly made me see each one of them, aching, unique, and multi-faceted as they are;
Each one I love,
and in whom
(like I believe we will in every person, if we look close enough)
I see a part of myself.
We are all delicately balancing.
We all have different needs.
We are all trying to move through these difficult times and still maintain ourselves.
We are all trying to find ways to still smile,
and keep going,
and to hopefully, in the process,
love someone else.
These are draining times,
and it’s easy for your arms to get sore from trying to hold up the corners of your own mouth,
and your heart,
and practically the whole entire world all yourself.
So tonight I wanted to tell you,
if you don’t have someone doing it already,
and as if I’m on the edge of your bed,
smoothing your hair, too,
that I see you trying so hard to do all the things you are doing,
and I am really, really proud of you.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
