Plans In Pencil

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.

It was a family event: we all lumbered down to the hotel pool so that The Husband could swim with the boys and I could swim…laps. Otherwise known as exercise. Otherwise known as sanity after a day of being in Auckland on my own with them while TH worked a few blocks away.

I prefer to exercise in the morning, but my kids don’t give a shit about what I prefer, so instead we had spent the morning walking to breakfast, then being shuttled up sixty floors in the Sky City Tower, which I could swear was swaying in the breeze as we circled its summit. After that, we hurtled back down to the gift shop where the kids each bought something they’ll never touch again, then the rain began so we headed back to the room for a movie.

When TH arrived back, my eyes told him I needed a break.

As I headed from one end of the pool to the other, I set up a rhythm of paddling, breathing, turning. Once I fell into it, I peeked through my goggles and saw a woman sitting in her hotel-proffered robe and slippers by the window with its view of the early winter darkness. She was on her phone and I couldn’t help but think that this was not the scene she came here to relax to: two boys splashing and shrieking as their dad egged them on and their mother swam away from them, then came back. Swam away, then came back. Always with the coming back.

“I used to be you,” I thought to myself, to her, considering the million ways my travel experience–my life–has changed since bringing the two of theirs into the world.

I used to be the twenty-something girl casting glances at the families on the ferry, likely thinking, “Ugh. That looks miserable,” as tiny legs and arms were wrangled into seats and jackets, as “inside voices” were encouraged, then begged for, as commands gave way to bribery. We used to be the couple at the restaurant who lingered over each course and paired it with wine instead of guzzling down the red while mopping up the youngest’s spilled milk then leaving in a rush because it’s bath time.

“Other countries are different,” The Kid protested the night before our trip, when excitement had predictably given way to anxiety and I was trying to reassure him in the darkness of his and Little Brother’s room at bedtime. “New Zealand is new and different. Australia is old and the same.” The latter clearly being his preference.

“But Australia used to be new and different too,” I told him as LB began to snore beside us, anxiety a missing part of his vocabulary. “Imagine if we had never come, if we had never gotten used to it. New and different can be good. They can become old and the same.”

He considered it as he drifted off to sleep. So did I, as I lay beside him.

We spent the next few days exploring the new and different: riding a bus around an island filled with wineries (and only visiting one; this would NOT have been the score pre-kids). Driving two and a half hours to see hobbit houses, filling the time with a kid-friendly recounting of the tales from Middle Earth, TH and I bouncing back and forth with the details we remembered. Riding lifts up and down. Losing my wallet in that damn gift shop then having it returned to me later by security. Taking the boys to the pool myself, where we found the hot tub full of errant bubbles and proceeded to slather them all over ourselves. Spending rainy afternoons piled on the bed watching Paddington 2 again. And again. Piling back onto the bed as a foursome after brief and semi-disastrous dinners, smashed together, all of it too much and just right at the same time.

And with every other lap in that hotel pool, I would turn and head back toward them: TK’s legs bobbing in the water as he faced me, waiting to grab at me when I passed, his laughter reaching me under the water where mine bounced back in response, bubbling to the surface.

I don’t laugh on my solo lap-swims.

This life and its mundanities–two kids, a house, piles of laundry, dinner ruts, grocery trips, the same paths covered daily on the way to school and work–being the source of such extremes: extremes in mood, in emotion, in geography. This life, smashing us into its corners and crevices until we fill it all, together.

On the way home from the airport, we asked the boys their favourite part of the trip. TK spoke up first: “The hotel.” The place where we woke up each morning, where we returned each night, where we piled up in the bed. Four walls filled with such extremes, but so much sameness. Same being what we always come back to–yet another word for home.

I may say I don’t belong here, but I know I do…Nobody looks away when the sun goes down.

On Sunday, The Kid woke up complaining of a sore tummy. He dragged himself from the bed to the couch, where he promptly vomited. We spent the day at home accomodating his illness, and I stayed positive about it, thinking all this rest would do the family good, plus he’d probably be better by the next day, twenty-four-hour bugs and such.

On Monday, with grey shadows lining his eyes, he announced that he was still sick. We took Little Brother to school and came back home. I rolled his six-year-old ass out in the stroller so I could get some exercise and we passed a dead squirrel whose carcass was being picked at by a nasty bird (redundant. All birds are nasty).

This morning, TK and LB and I walked out the front door and came upon an entire gaggle of such nasty birds, picking through our trash and tossing it around our yard. “Why are they eating rubbish?” the boys asked, and I couldn’t even enjoy their proper Australian phrasing because I was yelling at the birds. “Get OUT OF HERE!” I screeched, as a mum from TK’s school who lives down the street walked by and grinned, waving, my life playing out like a horror movie before her eyes.

The mornings always come with full force, and I never feel ready for it.

The mornings are when TK and LB know how to push each other’s buttons, one sitting justcloseenough to the other on the couch to drive them both crazy, feet flailing and hands slapping, screams over the TV I shouldn’t be letting them watch while I show up for work as short-order cook, school-bag-packer, bed-maker, ass-wiper, referee.

The mornings are when the weight of the day sits square on my chest and I let it, seeing only the To-Dos. The mornings are when I feel only chains, and no freedom.

These late-autumn days are short, and the morning sun arrives late, and I want to stay in bed until after it’s high in the sky. Impossible, most of the time. But the evenings arrive early, and Sydney has planned ahead for that. In the Northern hemisphere, the arrival of short days and cold weather initiates my Pavlovian response: bring on Christmas. Here, that thought springs to mind then is quickly corrected: bring on the lights. Vivid Sydney stretches over a few weeks, over the bridge from autumn to winter, and in the cold we see not the twinkling lights of Yuletide but the illuminated colours of June, the art splashed across the Opera House and the twinkling of the ferries, the city and its bridge piercing the sky with pink, purple, green, blue and back again. It’s not Christmas, but it’s not nothing.

The other night The Husband and I took one of those ferries into the city. Along with everyone else on it, we looked through our phones and even our eyes at the festival of lights greeting our approach. The night before, we had gone to the zoo with friends and their kids, frogs and elephants and giraffes formed out of coloured bulbs. On this night, though, the kids stayed home with their sitter and we sat in a theatre, floored by music we only knew a few words to. The rest was new, but it resonated, lyrics as poetry as narrative. “This is Alabama,” he sang, the second time my home state has been featured on the Opera House stage for me to hear, sounds of a deeper home than state or country inching their way through my soul, stretching across hemispheres and oceans to right where I sit.

Evening is for date nights, for bedtime with the four of us splayed across two doubles that have been pushed together because the boys like being close and they like for us all to end the day in one spot. I keep thinking we should put a halt to this; it eats up too much time, right? But I see eight feet lined up and wonder if maybe this is how it should be.

The mornings are heavy. But they’re also when, lately, the boys in TK’s class have been playing Lava Monster, and he rushes me through the school gate so as not to miss it. He runs and jumps onto a bench alongside him and they shout his name with all the others, and LB’s if he’s there too, and TK looks around, grinning widely.

This morning I went back out and returned all the rubbish to its bins, then looked around for a more permanent solution. “How are you going to weigh it down?” TK asked me, itching to get to school already, and I spotted the rocks in our driveway. I grabbed two handfuls for the two bins and placed them in the centre of the lids, knowing that upon my return the stones would likely be scattered by our nasty feathered friends, and TK grasped my hand as we headed away.

I kissed his grinning face then walked back with a friend, turning onto our street and holding my breath, gearing up for my new job: trash collector. But as I approached, I saw that the birds had given up. The rocks remained, blocking their pecking beaks, blocking their destruction and decay.

Some mornings bring stones in place, mystery held inside that looks an awful lot like death and mourning. Then it turns out the stones were holding life, which also seems to come in the morning, chains broken and real light coming through.

It is the calm after the storm, and I’m just trying to find some level footing.

The “storm” is the chaos of a weekday morning, and the “calm” is the period of time after which I’ve dropped both boys off at their school, prying their arms off my legs/gently pushing them toward their classrooms after a two-hour stint of a thousand why questions paired with several trips to the bathroom for me and them, together, always together. They’ve climbed all over me, kicked me with spindly heels, demanded changes to their breakfast menu, yanked on my arms enough to have lengthened them at least by a few millimetres. I am stretched and weary and emotionally spent, and it’s barely 9:30 am.

I felt the need to get that out before I talk about how much I love our life here. Because it is still life, which means it is messy and hectic and full of death and resurrection.

But Sydney has been good to us. It has been, it is, home to us. We have a life here. We have so much life here.

To wit: a couple of weeks ago the boys and I went to dinner for the birthday of one of their friends, which was really just a chance for the parents to get together at a BYO establishment and toast said birthday with bottles of bubbles. While we toasted, the kids danced (and an elderly couple nearby grimaced and groaned, and I grew anxious and angry, and they complained. Life and death.). On the way home, I explained to the boys that not everyone likes dance parties in restaurants and some people just aren’t very happy, so in a rare moment of frivolity in spite of my anxiety anger, I suggested we have a dance party at home. As “The Greatest Show” blared from our speakers, we bounced around our dining table and displayed what I can only imagine were pretty sick moves. These are the moments I pray they remember, rather than the gritted-teeth responses I grant to their nonsense questions in the rushed morning hours.

To wit: I woke up Saturday morning in a hotel room by myself, not because I’d run away, but because I was celebrating my annual leave, a Mother’s Day gift from The Husband that involves a staycation at the Sheraton. I’d read chapters and chapters, drunk glasses, and watched a movie. I’d luxuriated in a bath and woken up without feet in my face or anyone asking, “Why don’t trees have butts?” I’d gotten a massage and gone for a run. I’d heard about a school shooting in Texas and grieved and grown angry. Life and death. And then I’d come home.

To wit: after hearing about that school shooting, after seeing the faces of the dead yet again and hearing the arguments for and against yet again, and imagining those I love in that position yet again, we went to The Kid’s school for their annual fireworks night. We lost Little Brother at one point for a couple of minutes until he was returned to us, tear-stained and wailing, “That was scary.” We spread our blanket on the ground among friends. We looked up at the night sky as lights pierced and illuminated it. My friend’s daughter sat in my lap, and the boys sat in TH’s. “HAPPY VALEMTINE’S DAY!” LB yelled as the lights exploded above us. “Cheers to living in Mosman,” my friend turned and said, clinking her wine-filled coffee container to mine. “They look like fairy dust in the sky,” said the girl in my lap. Death and life.

Later, I watched the royal wedding with a group of friends I never would have made were our lives and home not relocated here. Were my hopes not dashed, then shipped across the ocean, then pieced back together over the past year and a half, relocated themselves from my own misplacing of them in myself and my comforts to their true, rightful spot: within the unpredictable safety and death-defying life of grace. In the Mockingbird, Ian Olson writes of Abraham and Sarah (who knew a little something about relocation)–and all of us–“When the Lord of creative mercy interrupts our presumptions, it is an invitation to genuine hope: ‘Leave the impossible to me.’ The acceptance of our inabilities isn’t a resignation of our yearnings so much as it is the relocation of our hope to another…Someone else has taken responsibility for this pair’s misbegotten schemes and sealed them with hope.”

Sealed with hope. Through mean and angry old people misunderstanding my children, through fears wrought by the tyranny of weapons, through losing children and finding them, through chaotic mornings that stretch the limits of sanity, through moves across the world, through nights exploding with lights that boom with beauty. And as those lights continued above us, I snuck a peek at the crowd, all looking in the same direction: up. “This is AWESOME!” LB yelled. And it was. And it is.

I didn’t post anything about Mother’s Day on social media this year. Couldn’t bring myself to do it. Didn’t have the energy. And that was only partly due to the hangover I was sporting on Sunday, which was due to an outing the day before with one of my closest friends here: lunch, ballet, dinner, her house after, all doused with champagne and pinot noir. My ambivalence, though, was about something deeper. Something that needles me about this day and always has. Something that gets down to the deep roots of motherhood.

The Kid is all knees and elbows now. Not an ounce (gram) of fat to be found anywhere. When he curls up next to me, I feel every sharp edge: his toes, heels, even his bony butt. No longer are there the butterball curves of babyhood or even the waning rolls of Little Brother’s late toddlerhood. I am knocked about by renegade limbs even as I receive the affection that keeps my heart beating.

It’s complicated. And this, this is motherhood.

TK’s school organised a Mother’s Day stall wherein small gifts would be sent in for the students to choose among and purchase for their moms. Guess who sent in the gifts? Guess who organised the stall? This is motherhood.

I can’t tell you how many separate conversations I was involved in about the paradox of Mother’s Day, which is really just a reflection of the contradictions held by motherhood: breakfasts made for a mother who cleaned the kitchen afterward; laundry left unattended without attention called to it, only to pile up and be dealt with Monday by the mother who was exempted the day before. Mother’s Day is like being issued a holiday from your boss, only to return on Monday to find that he (HE) didn’t acquire a substitute in your place and the work just amassed to double the typical level.

If I sound angry and resentful, it’s because I am. I’m also grateful, and joyful, and relieved to be exactly where I am.

It’s complicated.

And no one does complicated like mothers. No one does guilt like them either. This line we constantly walk between being wanted and needed. This role we play that we know, having been told endlessly, is the most pivotal one in our young children’s lives, which just leaves us feeling one of two ways: suffocating under the weight of it, or terrified we’ll get cancer and it will end early and we’ll leave them half-orphans.

Maybe there are some who don’t feel this way. Actually, I think a few are in my Instagram timeline. They feel every moment in only its glowing warmth, with none of the resentments that come with its weight. Well, congratulations to them. How wonderful that it’s all so easy. The rest of us over here, though? The ones having real conversations and drinking a bit too much at the brunch we packed the diaper bag and picked out the kids’ clothes for? We’re the real heroes, thank you. Because no matter how hard it gets (and we ACKNOWLEDGE that it’s hard, constantly), we keep showing up. We don’t leave. Even though the airport and bus station beckon like beacons in our sleep-interrupted nights.

To wit: LB is in the throes of a cold, which has left his nose a faucet. A clear-liquid faucet, thank you, no green snot to be found. But he’s wiping it constantly and has rubbed his upper lip to the point that it looks like he has a red moustache. Cut to his school calling me yesterday and today, yesterday as I was sweating at the gym and today as I was sitting down with some peppermint tea, to come collect him. Now we’re sitting on the couch together, he wiping his nose on my shirt and I attempting to make sense of it all on my computer as some bullshit cartoon airs from Netflix before us.

This is motherhood.

We are the bottom line, the first call, the last line of defence. We are tired, probably hungry, more than a bit resentful, and forever changed. We have given our bodies to the effort and they show no signs of recovering. We donate our minds to the cause (no one told me that introversion is not conducive to parenting young kids; I feel there should be a course on this). We feel crazy every second of the day: crazy with love for these small people who rule our hearts and overwhelm our days.

It’s fucking hard, man. And it can’t be summed up in an Instagram photo.

LB’s favourite toy lately is The Husband’s mousepad (the one he uses when he works from home late at night because he gets home to have dinner and help with baths and I am a shithead, yes I know). It has photos of our family all over it, and LB refers to it as his map. I cling to this child-ordained christening: a work object that contains all four of us; this quartet in front of him serving as the thing that leads him home. That, even when I strain and rail against it, leads me there–is my home–as well.