ESSAY
It’s Spring Here on This Island of Mothers
It is 37 degrees outside and raining. My son has no socks or pants on and he’s desperate to go outside. Logic and order do not rule him yet, so I tickle-wrestle-chase him through the dining-living-bedroom and tug on a sock. He protests with the full force of his body, first going rigid then boneless like a cat who doesn’t want to be held. Pants, fleece, rainsuit. We are both sweating. Hat. Red rainboots. No, Mama, green. Green rainboots. And then finally we burst outside into the freezing rain and splash in the puddles, race around the empty tennis courts and poke sticks into the mud, uncovering the white curve of a spring bulb about to break the surface. Careful, careful, I tell him, explain it is a flower and sense his skepticism.
No one sees me doing this.
Not friends. Not family. My wife, thank god, is here. We see each other. We look at each other and marvel at how much we are the same, and also entirely changed, new dragons fresh from the shell. Transformed by parenthood. We are Mama and Mor. We are twin suns around which our son orbits. We bring him warmth and food and laughter and comfort when he despairs. After we put him to sleep, we nuzzle into each other at night and whisper how grateful we are to be together through this, new parenthood in a pandemic, to bear witness for each other when no one else is here inside the walls of this house.
It is late winter in Seattle. The first flowers are up. The hellebores are feeding the bossy hummingbird who perches in the dead branches at the top of our blighted hazelnut tree. In my overgrown garden path, an inconveniently placed patch of orange crocus appears overnight like a miracle, bright and merry and sure to be accidentally trampled within the week. They came with our house and their appearance wrings a longing from my chest that I was sure had finally dried up with last year’s bloom. But no, it is there so sweet and painful and my nose tingles trying not to weep as I hold my son’s hand while we sidestep the flowers on the way out the door. This is the time of year when my mom is most on my mind, when we used to talk daily about the latest blooms or the seedlings she was starting in her cold frames, high in the mountains of Colorado. I sent her photos of these flowers the year we bought our house and every year after, a gift to mark our favorite season. She sent me snapshots of the aspens still dusted with snow and her tiny spinach starts unfurling their first leaves. We traded these glimpses of our out-of-sync gardens, exchanging wonder for wonder, tiny miracles.
I recently asked my father how he and Mom potty trained me. He was in town for a visit, and we were taking a break on a bench in the arboretum near our house. My son, almost two years old, sat between us, his tiny fingers pulling plump raisins out of a box to pop in his mouth. In the winter garden we had just walked through, the dogwoods blazed red and orange and the camellia had already shed unlikely soft pink petals onto the ground. The Douglas firs and Western Red Cedars dripped all around us, but the day was bright and sunny and we were outside and all together, a rare thing. My wife and I have just started potty training our son, in a casual sort of way, and I’ve been asking everyone who has raised a child about it, collecting tips like a crow after pizza crusts on the sidewalk.
Your mother handled that. I was working a lot then. It’s true. My mom quit her job as a flight attendant, a job she loved, after I was born. She had two weeks of leave and then went back up in the air with her mandated high heels and the hard bulk of a late 70’s-era breast pump and a bruised body and a 6 lb infant at home and she called home in tears and my parents decided together that nope, they would make do with less. So I know something of their financial situation at the time. But he said it like he was admitting something, like I would blame him for not knowing. My mother handled a lot when it came to me. Now a mother myself, up to my chin in the mundane and sublime of it, I understand how much she handled that I never even guessed at. I see more in my memories of her than I did before. My mother has been gone, dead from pancreatic cancer, for almost nine years now. Which means no one on this earth knows exactly how I was potty trained. Which is no real tragedy. And yet. It is a blank spot. A hole in my history that does not feel insignificant when I follow my son through the house, attuned to each wiggle of his naked form, asking him if he has to go every 20 minutes. Nope, he says. And then pees on the couch.
My son is growing with alarming speed. Everyone says how fast children move from newborn to toddler to teen, but still. I am shocked at how quickly it is happening. He recently sprouted wrists from the pudgy blocks of his arms, joints that can twist to make art or aim a ball or tug and twirl my hair when we cuddle together in the night when he wakes up crying, afraid of something he doesn’t yet have the words to tell me, something I cannot know. He is going by so fast and I want to capture all of it. Not just with pictures but in the way of collective memory. The way we pass memories back and forth among friends and families, folded and unfolded and looked at over and over until they are little legends that make up the map of our lives.
We’re doing our best to record these waypoints for him, to unearth the stories that will matter for him. We build his legends into the minds of our friends and family, the community we hoped would be inside these walls with us from the beginning. We relay the stories we hope someone else will repeat back to him, broadcasting seeds of knowledge that may bear fruit in another season, little smoky orange tomatoes that might feed him something essential in the coming summers.
I am very bad at dressing my son. I tug his leg into an armhole of the bright teal fleece dragon suit he’s worn all winter, realize my mistake and start the whole process of wrestling his starfish limbs out and then back in again. He’s already so patient with me. Usually we giggle. Sometimes I take long, loud exhales through my nose to keep my temper because he has thrashed a leg and kicked me in the jaw and how can I not know how to fucking do this yet? (The answer comes the next morning when I pull on my own pants and they are inside out: I was never good at this.)
My sweet son will not remember how comically bad I am at this small, daily act of motherhood. His conscious memories will start to stick once he is already putting himself into winter layers. And besides, he has better, more important things to remember than this. I have better, more important stories to tell him about this time. My wife is here, in all her grace. She sees, gently teases, offers help. Sings a song to distract him as I button, rebutton and zip. But no one else sees me doing this. Our friends, who we imagined a part of this joy and mess, are in their own worlds of mess and joy, know only what we tell them. So much of who we are, right now in this moment, is forever lost to their memories, to the ongoing record of our friendships. My mother cannot laugh or chide or judge or offer advice. Years from now, we will not stroll through a garden sipping coffee and compare notes about ourselves as new mothers.
We are in a new season and we are transformed. We are a new species, only two of our kind here on this island of mothers, learning to live with the loneliness that no one saw our emergence. We are in a new world, an archipelago, the neighbors waving from other islands. There are no ferries, no bridges yet. No parties that go too late, flowing from house to house, from kitchen to backyard campfires, chins dripping s’mores and tall glasses of cold beer and packs of children exhausted by a day of play asleep together on dew-damp blankets under the summer stars. Soon, soon. I look at our son. I marvel at his sleeping form, at the kinetic bursts of his tiny body, at the sharp white teeth punching through his gums. I look out, look forward and try to remember all of it.