This is my mantra when I haven’t written in days, when the house is loud with children, when the lambs are being born and I am in the barn elbow-deep in a sheep’s uterus. It is what I tell myself when the house is messy (disgusting is the actual word I use)— laundry piled up on the couch, the bathmat speckled with hay and pebbles, the rug littered with tiny pieces of paper my 4-year-old cut up to make “soup.”
I look around and sigh, pick up some kid undies I’m not sure are clean or dirty, pick up two pieces of trash as if I’m at a beach clean-up saving the environment, saving the world, as if these two pieces will make a difference shifting them from floor to bin.
The kids say I am The Cook as I serve them our hens’ eggs (scrambled with cheese and sea salt or a meltdown ensues) and homemade fucking bread spread thick with butter and jam. Minutes later I am squatting in front of an unscrubbed toilet in an uncleaned bathroom wiping poopy butts and wondering why I went to university.
For this.
For this?
And then my seven-year-old takes my face in her hands and kisses my cheek, my forehead, and I think yes.
For this.
For this!
But the mornings are still hard when stories are calling me and I tell them to hush for now, hold on for now, I will return I swear I will, please just hold on. But am I meant to hold on? Or release and let the stories sing through my body and return to the stars, just like these precious lives of ours?
My daughter looks up into the sky, head cocked, and says, “I hear her. I hear Tunie in the eagle’s call!” Her face is alight with connection, recognition, her dear great aunt singing from the sky after leaving this world months ago. And this is what it is: connection. That is what I am craving, and my adult mind thinks that writing is the only way to be connected to story! But my daughter has it right—we are the stories, written or not, connected every day to spirit. I just need to tip my head to the sky and listen, let the knowing flood through, trust that I am in the right place, right timing for this all. I just need to hold my girls tight, feel their hearts beat against mine, be present to the love story we are. Connecting.
And though I hold these aspirations in my head, I know there will be days when mothering feels too hard, when I hear the eagle in the sky and think, Are you too asking something of me, something I am too tired to give? Or asking me to carry a story I do not have time to write? I will crawl into bed in my mind (as there is little room for such rest in real life) and huddle under thick blankets of sadness and regret, of wishing I was somewhere warm or somewhere alone or both and I will accept this melancholy for a while. Or accept not accepting. I will turn the pages of my life and mourn the adventurer I once was, anchored now, only writing about sea voyages and scaling the Himalayas instead of actually doing so. I will coo to myself that this is but another season in life, a different chapter from the ones before, maybe the lowest point or the highest point in the hero’s journey; it’s hard to know where to place oneself in one’s own story. But I will surrender to this too—the grief of time passing, of freedoms lost, of constant laundry. I surrender knowing that this too will change and someday my girls will travel with me and exclaim at the brilliance of the Caribbean Sea or the vibrancy of foreign syllables clanging together in a busy market.
Someday I will have all day to write—an even harder concept to imagine and one tinged with sadness.
Someday my girls will wave me a cheerful goodbye as I go off on my chosen journey and they go off on their own.
Someday they will even do their own laundry.
Until then, I will laugh and sob and scream and smile and do all the things in each little moment of each little day and listen as words whisper into my ears, stories and life entangled, as they are, as they always will be, while my girls swirl around my legs, (my heart, my mind,) full of stories and whispers of their own, our stories forever unfurling, forever interwoven.