On Mothering

Mothering, like anything becomes more real the more you do it. I am not sure it gets easier but I am sure you get stronger, in all of the ways one can get strong. Strong in the mind and the heart and the back. Strong in all of the places that matter in the middle of the night.

Somewhere along the way I integrate in a new way to this mothering life; like waking up to realize you were dreaming in Spanish. It gets in, embedded to the in between spaces the way ivy grows to bricks walls. You are surprised and it is beautiful.

If I hadn’t promised his father when we met that he could name our first born son, then I would have named him something simple like blue or offer. Then he would have always carried the sea with him.

When it is just him and I we walk down to the water and I tell him about the ocean and what lives there and the names for seashells and seagulls and seaweed. We walk the same shoreline I did when I was pregnant and I tell him about before, and who I was and what it felt like to kiss a stranger on the streets in Bogota. I tell him about what life tastes like and sardines and the smell of the sunset in a country neither him or I have been to yet. I tell him about heartache.

He watches the water move around my feet like there isn’t another thing in the whole world, and perhaps there isn’t. All those years I thought it was the ocean calling to me but now I can see it was him, and that he was always here.

What suits me most of all in this mothering time is the definiteness of it. There is no debate, no what if, no other. There only is this. This is what was always meant to be. It answers any questions I had about my life, about time, about love, and why we are here.