Last night, I crawled in the bottom bunk to read to Ada. She picked three books like always, a rule we took from one of our favorite stories, Olivia.
We read The Giving Tree by the warm glow of twinkle-lights wrapped around the bed frame. It’s one we’ve read many times but this time was different. As I read, I heard Ada sniffle. She’s had a bad cold so I assumed her nose was stuffy and read on. As I closed the book though, she buried her face into my neck and wept.
Startled, I sat up as much as a grown woman can sit up in a bunk bed and cradled my first-born. “What is it, baby?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
“No, Momma,” she said between sobs. “I’m so sad.”
“Did the story make you sad?”
“Yes, Momma,” she said. “I am so sad for the tree. Why did the tree give everything to the boy?”
“Because the tree loved the boy,” I said kissing her forehead.
“But why did the boy leave her?” she asked.
“Because he had to live. He needed to love and see the world and have babies and explore,” I said.
“But that’s so sad,” she said. “I wish the boy could have stayed with the tree instead of taking everything from her.”
“It is sad, Sis. But the tree loved the boy and even though the boy leaves the tree, he always comes back,” I said, tears burning my own eyes.
She rubbed her eyes and dropped down to her pillow. “Momma, will you sing It’s Coming on Christmas?”
She meant, of course, Joni Mitchell’s River. With our heads on the same pillow, I sang:
It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
Putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on…
And before I could sing anymore, she was asleep.
Next month, she’ll turn five. I remember sitting up late one night before her first birthday, making party hats and crying. Travis asked me what was wrong and I said, “She’ll be five someday.” I went crazy planning that first birthday party but I was so overjoyed after all of those negative pregnancy tests I’d wrap in toilet paper and shamefully hide in the waste basket and all of those disappointing lab results and new prescriptions that I couldn’t help throwing all of myself into celebrating the life of a girl I thought I might never meet. I think I made a decoration for every wish I made during those dark times when I thought she’d never come.
Ada asked me last week what our life looked like before she was born; was our house clean? What did we do all of the time? Yes, our house was clean. There were no crackers on the floor. I had clean hair, too. But I was sad. For as long as I can remember, I have known my children. They were there, in my bones, even when I was a little girl. Infertility made me question a lot but most of all, I doubted my intuition. Each negative pregnancy test felt like a death in a way. Even now, five years into mothering, when I wake up in the middle of the night after a horrible dream and hold my babies because I’m worried I may lose them, there is a brutally honest part of my soul that says losing them, though devastating, wouldn’t be as terrifying as never having them at all.
I don’t say that lightly, either. And though I have found purpose in my children, I don’t intend to say that all women should have babies to find purpose. I have come to realize that I am not what you’d call a traditional mother. Yes, I felt my babies in my bones but I’m not a natural mother. I don’t fuss over hats and gloves or worry myself over beds being made. I lack what seems to be the mothering-gene I see so many other moms have. It is something I envy sort of, that ability to mother. I wonder sometimes if I would have made a better quirky aunt, the one who lets you take a sip of red wine to commemorate your first period or sit in car with the windows down on a summer evening, listening to the radio in cut-off shorts and bare feet on a dashboard. I am a mother who sings her baby to sleep with Joni Mitchell songs instead of Jesus Loves Me. I am very good at loving my little people but I stumble through the job of mothering. I tell you all of this because I don’t believe I’ve found my purpose in mothering but in love. Day by day, I do my best to make peanut butter sandwiches and fold laundry and color in coloring books not because those things fulfill me (honestly, I battle being bored out of my mind) but I do them because I am in love with these people we’ve made. This beautiful, little soul who cries now when she hears The Giving Tree.
They are growing up on us. Everyone warned me it would happen and I’ve watched for it, slept beside them to savor even the nighttime hours hoping that maybe that would make the most of these bittersweet years with them. I say bittersweet because it is; this phase of life is every bit as hard as it is sweet. Yet I, who have tried so hard to live in the moment and enjoy every bit of them whether they are laughing or throwing epic tantrums, blinked and was startled to notice their changes in a candid photo I captured one morning in bed.
They are growing up.
Next year, Ada starts kindergarten and Eli starts preschool. I can almost taste the freedom and I’d be lying if I said I don’t look forward to at least three days a week of being me again. I will write and make things and take regular showers. But then, it’s sad, too. Once I let them out into the world, they’ll want to keep going. I can’t blame them. There is so much to see. Even I am chomping at the bit to see it all.
But for now, I want to be more present with my little people because at some point, my daughter grew up enough to realize that The Giving Tree is not a book about apple trees. She knows now that the boy will leave and that it will be sad. She knows.
I haven’t made a lot of plans for 2016 except this:
From now until next August when the kids start school, I’ll only be posting on the blog once a week, on Tuesdays, and I’ll use Instagram as a journal of sorts to write about our day-to-day lives. I feel like this is the best way for me to give enough attention to both my family and my work without sending me to an early grave. This past year, I worked so much that my mom said I wasn’t just burning the candle on both ends, I was like a candle on a warmer, always burning. Always going.
You know, it makes me laugh when I hear people talk about women having it all. The women I know spend a lot of time worrying about giving it all. They give their energy, their creativity, the very food on their plates and I believe, lack the time to truly ponder having much of anything. No, the women I know don’t think twice about having it all because they are too busy giving it all. This year, I need to shift where my giving goes a bit.
There is one line from The Giving Tree that strikes me differently now that I’m a mom: And the tree was happy. Yes, the tree has given up her apples so the boy can eat but she is happy. I may be pulling back on my work this year, work that brings me joy, but I want to savor these next six months before they both are in school. What work can I accomplish in six months that will fill my soul as much as spending more focused time with Ada and Eli?
After all, I’ve read that book many, many, many times and I know the boy leaves and it will be sad. But I also know that given enough love, the boy comes back.
One Response
I, too, had a very busy year. Best year of calligraphy and part-time work, ever. Best decision I made all year was an early deadline for orders in my Etsy shop before Christmas. I didn’t want the panicked messages 2 days before Christmas that someone’s Santa letter had not arrived yet, and the ensuing re-doing and potential and costly overnight shipping. From the 15th on, I concentrated on my family and the holidays. That showed me that its ok to set boundaries, and most people understand that. Yes, I even turned down work with impossible deadlines.