The Hardest Season

It’s true what they say, that’s it’s easy to lose yourself to motherhood. That it’s easy to devote yourself to someone so tiny and raw and real that you forget that you once existed before them. I don’t want this to be a laundry list of what I’ve lost, but instead a reminder of how to regain it. I don’t want my daughter thinking that she is the reason why I haven’t straightened my hair in over two and a half years or why my goals and dreams feel fragmented. That the days blur together into weeks and months. I lie with her until she falls asleep, and I step out of her room a different person, exhausted, covered in milk, my hair a bird’s nest, my heart heavy with relief that she is asleep, and yet I feel like I’ve left a part of me in a tiny bed with monkey sheets. It feels this way because I have. I don’t want this to be a list of things I dislike about motherhood. Instead, I want to be mad at a society that doesn’t support us in balancing both: motherhood and selfhood. Parenthood and personhood. We are cogs in the machine, forced to keep working, working, working. I barely have time for make believe: that pink car my daughter loves to pretend to drive takes up most of my evenings. I do not have time for my own dreaming, scheming, plotting.

Photo by Maxim Tolchinskiy on Unsplash

My relationships have suffered. Half the friends from my hometown stopped reaching out. They do not understand that I was drowning in diapers thousands of minutes. That kissing her cheeks still occupies a large chunk of my day. That there are certain days when all I want to do is stare at my child and follow her around like a journalist following around the next big thing. What is it like being you? I want to ask. Tell me what you’re thinking about. Your favourite colour is pinky purple, we stan, I say. My husband and I used to go out. We used to watch movies in one sitting. We used to have sex. Now we watch movies over three days. We leave series half-finished and we don’t talk about the future, not really. We tell ourselves that this season of life is hard. That last season was even harder. That one day we will look back and miss the sticky hands and the weighted cuddles, but who will we all be then? If I close my eyes for too long, my child has graduated high school. She’s moving out. Our dog has died, and I live with a stranger I used to dream with.

I think about what I’ve lost, and I also think about what I’ve gained. This little human. This magically otherworldly creature that lights up a room. The knowledge that I can create with my body. That mothering is an action filled with love and fury. That my ambition is still there, cloaked in dried milk and dust from blueberry puffs as my daughter devours her forth helping. My ambition is screaming into my ear. She wants me to produce, create, produce, create. She is so sure I am on the cusp of the NEXT GREAT THING, but my body is tired. I press “next episode” and it plays. I promise myself I will not watch the whole series in one go. I don’t keep the promise, and it makes me feel like shit. A lot of things make me feel like shit, lately.

Photo by Alex Dukhanov on Unsplash

I watch my daughter writhe on the ground, her face scrunched up, tears falling like an April rain storm. She is beyond mad: she is livid. There is a rage in her I can’t quite articulate. It scares me. I am jealous of it. I, too, want to do this. I, too, want to lie on the floor kicking my legs when the colour of my glass isn’t pink like I wanted, even though we don’t have a pink cup that’s clean. I want to yell I DON’T LIKE YOU when I don’t get the funding I wanted, or when I don’t hear from the producers of one of my films for weeks. I want to kick and scream and cry. I want to channel this rage into something productive and magical, but what if I let it pass through me? What if, like my two-year-old, I let it out? What can she teach me about anger? What can she teach me about emotions? I imagine myself, all 5’10 of me, on my mismatched floor of my slightly run down house, having an absolute fucking fit. What would the neighbours say, if they saw me? What would my husband do, if he saw me seething with rage? What would my ancestors do? Would they be proud? Would they be jealous? Would Magdelena rise up and give me a hug for expressing the grief she could not? What is my body holding? What is my womb afraid to release? What does sheer, selfish rage look like, and why are we so afraid of it? Maybe my two-year-old has something important to teach us. Maybe we should take a page from her book. Maybe this is a revolution, a release, to let it all go (I’ve been watching too much Frozen).

And in the middle of all this, I sit in a noisy café, and this pours out of me, like it was meant to come out all along. That maybe, if I stop forcing and allow myself to sit with all of this, that’s when the magic will come. That’s when I will let go of what I’ve lost and instead look at what I’ve gained. I will look at myself in the mirror, my hair straightened for the first time in almost three years, and I will smile, knowing that there’s so much more life to live. That there’s so much more good to come.