Dragon Slaying

As I sit down to write, my mind settles on the muscles in my back and shoulders I don’t have names for. They’re pinched, tight, acidic. These are the muscles that allow my arms to wrap around my toddler in the night as we co-sleep. To wrangle my four-year-old against his cinderblock will into a diaper change I’m convinced is best for him, no matter what he has to say about it. And lately, to grip the shaking shoulders of my six-year-old who runs throughout the house in the middle of the night in a mind-world I cannot enter, terrorized by demons I cannot see.

Stop! I command. With my mind, I banish them. I bring him to bed with me, and squeeze his muscles with mine for as long as it takes to both lull him out of his night terror and into sleep. It could be ten minutes, it could be an hour. But my muscles won’t relax until his do. I apply relentless comfort to reassure his existence and kill his phantoms’—a quest that brings new meaning to the old phrase, “bedtime battles.”

Our bedroom is equal parts bloody Colosseum and mother hen haven. But it is my aching muscles that make this room anything at all. Don’t worry, child. I take this pain gladly. I will slay your dragons with my last breath.

And during daylight hours, I will train you with chores and fortify you with fairy tales and grow you with a garden, because someday, before I am ready, you must be. And I will be forced to watch you outside these eyes, hold you without these arms, and whisper, voiceless—screaming for you through the halls of heaven.

A body is a vessel. No more. And no, no less.

Mothers on the wall

I have three limited edition Caitlin Connolly art prints on the wall in my guest room.  They are entitled: “Mother Earth,” “Mother of All Living,” and “Mother Protecting.”   On early mornings like this one, I steal downstairs, turn down the covers, make myself at home in this room meant for others, and gaze at these mothers.

The common thread between them is the depiction of strong women doing the hard, vital work of life-giving.

They look at once raw and refined, centered and vulnerable.  Desperate and sure.

They’re all taking risks and making tough calls.

If that doesn’t define motherhood, I don’t know what does. 

When my first baby was little more than a year old, he stood up in the bathtub (against my warning) and slipped.  As he fell, his chin struck the side of the porcelain tub and split.

Without hesitation, I lifted him from the tub, wet a clean washcloth and tried to apply pressure to the wound.  He pushed me away, blood dripping onto the tile floor.  I put him to my breast, hoping the pressure from his face against me as I nursed him would be enough to stop the bleeding.

It was a swift, instinctive solution, and it worked.  After a couple of minutes the bleeding subsided, and he fell asleep.  But I didn’t like the look of the flap of skin and flesh I saw.   I knew he’d never let me bandage it.  Would it start bleeding again any moment?  How much blood is too much blood?

It was borderline. 

I wiped his blood from my chest and called my mom.  “How do you know if your baby needs stitches?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but I can tell you what my experience was taking your sister to get stitches when she was little.” 

She concluded, “If it’s under his chin, people won't notice the scar.”

She couldn’t, and didn’t, tell me what I should do.  Hearing her story both frightened and reassured me, and I suppose it did influence my decision somewhat.  But the call was mine, not hers.  I was the mother now.

The irony here is that as a daughter, I still believe mothers always know what to do.  But as a mother it rarely feels that way.

I’ve often reflected on that early parenting moment and the room it made inside me for instinct and doubt to coexist.  As steward over four children now, many decisions fall to me that affect both the present moment and the future.  Their future.  But the choice is mine.  And there’s no perfect answer.  

So I do it anyway.  And I do it afraid. 

Mothering is one tough call after another.  In all the time spent second-guessing (and I’ve spent a lot  of time second-guessing over my decade of parenthood), my instincts have always been right.

Or at least right enough.

So, like the mothers on the wall, I will set my intention, trust my instinct, and jump.