It is irrational to give up your body, your time, your life—to commit yourself to love someone so fully and completely--only to let them go. Mothers do it anyway.
When I was a young and new mother, I thought of parenting as a tricky sort of math. It seemed to me that if you added up the time and energy you gave, the years you slept less and tried your best, the greater the sum might be in the end. But then I learned that no matter how much love or time, no matter what I gave away to her, my child would someday go far away from me, because that is what I was raising her to do.
And this echoed hurt through the caverns of my bones. But still, I knew I would do it anyway.
We do not speak of the first shock, the alternating euphoria and despair. The body loathing and incredulity that swells in the hours and days after you first free a person from your womb and look mothering square in the red, wrinkled face. I imagined myself in her grayish-blue eyes as a blurry outline of sweaty indecision. Those first months were a sitcom of newborn entertainment, painful episodes in feeding and tears and constancy. There were times I did not really like mothering, but I did it still. Even when they’re young and terrified, mothers do it anyway.
We crawled through year one in our pajamas, spent the second year still on our hands and knees---scrubbing crayon off the walls. We laid flat on the wooden kitchen floor, the full stocky weight of her stretched out upon me. Every day, a lesson in confidence, a growing reminder of the purposefulness of my love.
Eating goldfish and watching Blues Clues through that entire third year, breaking all the rules because I could, because I was the boss, because neither of us had a nap today. In the fourth year, we tiptoed through the tantrums. In kindergarten, we caught a terrible cold. We stretched out our legs on the beach chairs of summertime and slouched in a heavy backpack up the concrete steps of elementary.
In middle school, there were first heartbreaks and stomachaches. We fought with fingers pointing, red-faced and hurting. She stomped upstairs and slammed her door and I knew then it was true, that she would grow away, long before she would go away. When she learned to drive, I learned to shut my mouth. When she kissed a boy, I gnawed on my fingers.
Before it even seems possible, you will find yourself wandering through the late summer of parenting, where the trees are specked with amber and fiery orange. When the leaves finally fall in a crunchy pile of brown skins, their color is a heady recollection of an overripe lunchbox pear. It is a sentimental, crushing sort of magic.
It is irrational to let someone go, because it is better for them—-when it is worse, so much sadder, for you. But that is how it is when have a beautiful, perfect plum in your hands. You are apt to want to show it, to share it with the entire world.
So you are fated to walk your days, through all the seasons that remain, missing a part of yourself. Because you loved it so hard and gave it so much, only to give it away.
Remember this, though, you couldn’t keep her. It was never part of the deal.
And still, mothers do it anyway.
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