Mothering

I worry about you because this part is so hard. These early years are all-consuming, exhausting, and isolating. It's so easy to lose touch with who you fundamentally are and to despair because the days never seem to end and each subsequent one feels precisely like those which have come before. And adages like, "Once they turn five, it is SO worth it" don't mean much when you're in the thick of things and you can barely make it to tomorrow. I need you to know that you aren't alone and that I haven't forgotten the loneliness of midnight followed by two am followed by four am followed by dragging yourself out of bed to do work you could care less about because our rotten country doesn't give a fuck what happens to women or children or families.

Having small children was, hands down, one of the most challenging and difficult periods of my life and though I am starting to come out and see the other side, you are deeply immersed and you did it during a global pandemic without a community of parents to help carry the load because we all lived with such fear of one another for most of the time you have been a mother.

In the thick of it, I worried that the person I was had disappeared. I thought I might never truly laugh again. I was, without knowing it, the most suicidal and unhinged I have ever been. I was desperate for a break, for a night of uninterrupted sleep, without any sense that could occur in any kind of immediate future. When you are in the middle of it, it feels endless and the exhaustion seeps through your bones to your very marrow and it all feels like some kind of terrible nightmare.

At least, up until very recently, that was my experience as a young, working mother. And it is such a mixed and ugly way to feel because that sense of fatalism is so very, very real but it is coupled with a deep, endearing, and limitless love for the creature beside you. They are love and joy and light and you can't help but smile when they do and you can't help but cheer them onward as they take those first stumbling steps away.

I can't make these years or this time easier for you, but I want you to know that you're not doing it alone. I wish I could do it physically beside you, but perhaps just knowing I think about you constantly is some kind of balm? Perhaps knowing that you aren't isolated in your struggle and desperation can be some kind of solace?

And in the years we have ahead of us, we need to work so that our daughters and sons don't feel so very, very alone as they set off on this journey. It is an absolute bit of lunacy that women endure pregnancy while working full time, endure the trauma of labor, and then are asked to return to work at six weeks to proceed like their child was a temporary nuisance who can be erased with full-time daycare when the mere presence of that child has demolished any sense of the human being they were before parenthood. The fact that women and men are expected to shed their pre-parental skin and develop an entirely new one while pretending it is all fine is one of the norms our ancestors will judge inhumane and unjust and ugly.

You are one of the loveliest humans I have had the privilege of meeting and loving. Your sons are so lucky to have your humanity, wisdom, and guidance as they make their way into a world that often feels too big, too unpredictable, and too scary. You are a light in this sometimes dark world and, even though it wasn't always modeled in your childhood, you are going to raise beautiful, brave, courageous, and supported children. I know it feels scary, but you are going to give them the love you didn't always feel and you are going to avoid so many of the traps your parents did not. I know this about you not as some wild conjecture, but because you have loved me and held me and kept me afloat even when despair blinded me.

I know it can feel dark in the thick of things. But I am here. So long as I can, I will always be here. And while I have breath left in this body, I will whisper my love for you into the night, into a passing cloud, where I pray it might land gently in your heart at midnight and two am and four am and you will remember, always, that you are beloved and lovable and that being their mom and my dearest is the universe thrumming with a reminder that there is, amongst the chaos, infinite blessings, a degree of order, and some things which are irrevocable and immutable and forever.