Day was still night, but it was all the same to him. He couldn’t go back down now that he was up. Couldn’t turn off now that he was on…
I remember that feeling from when I was a child.
My eyes wide under the covers. My ears listening to the predictable breathing beside me. My sister’s back moving softly against mine – silent against the rickety iron-stead bed we shared. The old feather tick must have absorbed the movement.
No moon-eye daydreaming. My eyes glance to the side … as dry as my humor reflects that moment in time.
It was torture.
The waiting is always the hardest part.
An eternity
I feel for him… my little guy who’s not-so-little anymore. I know what will happen now. He’ll pace the floor for hours before the sun comes up. I have to find something for him to do with those explorer’s hands of his. Those rough ‘n tumble hands. They’ll make storms otherwise…
He’s Zeus, casting thunderbolts down on our heads. Lightning crashes as I remember myself, dreaming about him before his birth. Back before I knew their father, when I was just a pigtail-braided girl in the sixth grade…
The storms are already brewing. I see him bowing his fingers backward, clenching them tight. They need no cracking. They’re warmed up. Ready.
It awaits…
Spring break dismantled his routine. He doesn’t tolerate it well. Neither do I.
He’ll dismantle everything around us now, only to demonstrate the chaos he feels. Just like me.
I can’t deny him what I give to myself with exuberance – the freedom to communicate. However, I also can’t reign in his wrath all the time. Not anymore.
The kind of hyper-vigilance necessary for this job puttered out of me years ago, back when I thought my effort was enough to make the difference.
It’s not.
My effort was never enough all by itself. I’m reminded of this by every woman who’s ever lent me a hand, given me the look, and spoken the words to reassure me. “It takes a village,” she’ll say, but she’s really telling me I’m not alone.
On the other side of the dial, the villages love to constrain. Villages of other mothers. Other mothers who mother better.
Everyone’s trying to help.
That’s the sorrowful-sweet I keep choking on… They’re all like me – they want to do for others. They want to help.
Faith Returns
Every night, I find myself feeling more like a child, hearing herself reciting her prayers for Mommy at the foot of the bed. As I lay me down to sleep … and that’s the childlike faith I feel restored.
I close my eyes with more peace than before. I realize with more awareness that tomorrow may never come, that my eyes may never open one day. Sleeping Beauty forevermore. Fear would have pushed me there faster and was. At least, for a time.
Nowadays, it comes to me in bursts – the ability to be as watchful as I should, to push harder than I ever thought I could before giving myself a reprieve. I can’t sustain it for long, so I cry more. Unabashed, not asking for anything but for you to ignore it.
I realize the human body isn’t built for this kind of focus, particularly now, as my age creeps in. And I’m feeling it in my bones.
Diligence
That’s what was needed, too. But I fell short there, as well.
I look down at my own hands. They feel so small. There was a time my daughter said they were magic. Magic fingers that could untie any knot…
But they cannot.
They’ve grown cold and clumsy.
In all the ways I thought I could handle this parenting thing, the cracks never failed to show.
And there she goes again, I say to myself with a sharp twinkle in my eye, feeling sorry for herself – yet never doing anything about it.
I hear myself with criticism, arguing and poking scissor-fingers into my flesh. Believe me, I know how self-serving I’ve been. I see how I’ve gotten hung up identifying the problem, as if it might change something. As if the label alone would force my feet to act.
The weight of it bears down on me, and it’s hard for me to move. It rings in my ears and stops me in my tracks instead. Although, I know it should not.
Ill-fated
You see, I’ve seen this coming. I just never knew what to do every time it all fell through, and that’s happened so many times. It kept me up at night, scheming about how to set it all to right. I’d wake up so tired, like I never slept at all.
Exhausted
Mommy’s heaviest quilt didn’t help. No special nightcap would do, not even the ones I used to share with my grandparents… ice cream or warm milk with molasses.
Sleep was filled with dreams at first. Then, they grew quiet. It all felt dark. They called to me from a quiet place, where my mind hid them from me. I knew they were there all the same.
Still…
I waited.
I didn’t do anything. I saw it coming, but instead of preparing, I took a nap. I sat there for a time, incapable of action – only watching as if it were a dream and I on the outside, looking in. Everything inside paused, and I waited.
Waited for what? For help?
Yes. I say it with such certainty, but then, I’ll say, “Maybe,” with even more decision.
The reality is I’m not sure. I stopped knowing how to help.
Dismantled
It kept getting ruined. I kept having to start over. Every little step forward was upturned. Every time I took my attention away and relaxed, some new catastrophe would uproot him for days or weeks or months…
It kept coming.
I couldn’t fight the current anymore. My resistence was pointless. Though, I never really tried any other method of infiltrating the impossible. You know, the go-around… The clutch three-pointer that would’ve meant the game. I was supposed to be Robert Horry and win the game for us.
That’s the pattern, wasn’t it? That’s where I was meant to hold up my MacGyver end of the deal.
Instead, I screamed and splashed around a whole bunch.
Boy… did I splash? I wet myself and everyone around me, so people started pulling away. Like I fear they’ll do with my boy… Because, that’s what they do – good people start pulling away. They can’t sustain for long.
It leaves only the wolves.
Before long, it starts becoming harder and harder to see them in their sheep’s clothing. My eyes go to my empty hands… I’ve done nothing to prepare him to fight them.
Alone.
Because he will be. He’ll be all alone when I’m gone, and all I’ve done is wait. I’ve not prepared him at all.
And no hero of the flesh will ever come to rescue him, nor me from the sadness that I fear will swallow me whole if I cannot sustain… if I cannot find it within to do what I’ve not in all these years.
Rebalance
There’s a lot that goes into all that waiting… My hands come up in defense, but my self-image isn’t the thing I’m shielding.
I have to give myself the measure of balance that others won’t. Their mouths are too full of words, chomping at the bit to reprimand me that they’re offsetting the scale.
Restructure
Let them.
My mind clears.
Focus on only that one thing, I whisper to myself to hear it more clearly – the measure of self-respect that would been neglected if I only listen to you, rather than myself. You won’t give me my dues, you see? You can’t even see me. You see what I let you see.
Resolution
The tremors from earlier steady, and my fingers find the keys with more deft. More decision.
The waiting is the hardest part, but there’s been a change. The dreams return and now they speak. Voices grow louder. Winds build their strength.
I look down at my hands, catching the pages flying free beneath, and I know it. Something has shifted. Something has been reborn.