Just when you think you’ve had enough and your dreams come true…I just want to be closer to you

Lately it feels like my children are more attached to me now than they were when I was pregnant with them.

It’s a recurring theme, in my own assessment and in my conversations with other mothers: the incessant need with which our young kids confront us, this constant and seemingly magnetic attraction to our bodies. The clinging and grabbing and leaning and pushing, the never-ending physical contact.

Yes, I know it will one day end. I know it will wind down to next to nothing compared to now. But right now I choose to enjoy the parts of motherhood other than The Kid’s kicks to my stomach in his early-morning slumber. Or the way Little Brother doesn’t have to go to the bathroom until I’m upstairs and sitting on my own toilet, completely indisposed but for the fact that he’s three and anything I have to do can wait, or be interrupted.

I coined the phrase myself–Mommy Protection Agency–for when The Husband is chasing them; it was a momentary lapse of judgment, a failure to see every time they would, from then on, race to me from him, hitting me full-speed, usually while I’m standing over boiling water at the stove or sitting with a glass of red, “relaxing.” In its best uses I am their willing landing pad, their safe haven, and we all fall into a pile of laughter together. In its most unwelcome ones I grit my teeth, sigh, imagine an island getaway for one. This territory defined by extremes is the essence of motherhood. I’m beginning to accept it…resentfully, usually.

I want to purely enjoy them. I want to be their safe harbour in a world full of threats that they will grow only more aware of. I want to be their unfailingly soft spot. I pray it at the end of hurried mornings and long days: help me make them feel safe, always. I pray it differently after tense moments and harsh words: let me never be the one to make them afraid. And yet I see the same regret I feel over those moments mirrored in other mothers’ eyes, hear it echoed in conversations in the school yard: we all feel like we’re failing. We are one bad morning away from having our maternal licenses revoked, and we have mixed feelings about it.

And then I think about how the hugs from my own mother, growing up, felt most familiar; how everyone else’s in comparison were just off: too bony, to fragile, too tight, just not quite right. Yet she wasn’t perfect either.

I want to be their most familiar, most comfortable embrace for as long as I can be. Also, I want space. This is motherhood.

No need to tell me this time of physical assault is temporary–I am well aware. I already carry the future guilt of my feelings around. Thank you, anxiety issues. Your forward thinking is always SO HELPFUL. That doesn’t change the fact that now, though, can be brutal. It can be unyielding and rough. I am scarred, always will be. I had no idea that pregnancy was only the beginning of carrying them with me.

“Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree/bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy,” I hear through my headphones at the end of a brutal run–they all have been lately, and short–and I think about how it’s always been the hardest things, the most well-rounded assaults, that have shaped me the most: the runs, the labour and childbirth, the moves across country and world. How they have always led me home.

The other day we arrived at TK’s school and he raced up to a classmate, a close friend, and got right up in his face the way he often does, boundary-less as he can be (when he’s not working behind ALL the boundaries; the territory of extremes is familiar to both of us), and I sucked in my breath, waiting to see if it would be all too much for his friend as it so often can be when those boundaries, that personal space, is broken. Not that I know. And TK’s friend, he gave a grin, gestured his hand toward TK, and said, “That’s my buddy James.”

I breathed again, the space around me suddenly granting more room while being more full at the same time. My body being this place from which they venture for longer and longer stretches but always return to, for now, home.