Posted on by slb

Jump at De Sun.

You have unassailable rhythm. This is a characteristic we noticed, even before you began to develop fine motor skills. You were three months old, and you could hit a drum with a mallet. You could keen your ear to cadences. The small cymbals of a tambourine shook under the strike of your infant palm. You hummed melodies before your mouth could form the ovals and planes necessary to pronounce lyrics.

Like so many children, you possess a raw musicality, a boundless curiosity in all instrumentation. But I also see an inkling of discipline in you, a commitment to practice quite unusual in two-year-olds. It is the rare day that passes without you asking to play your great-nana’s electric piano. Once you’re lifted onto the stool, it is difficult to coax you down. The praise you receive is too rapturous; the power you feel when the pads of your fingers elicit a chord is too intoxicating. We know that, if allowed, you would stay there for more than an hour as long as we were also there to laud you.

As your mother, it is my imperative to nurture this quality in you, even as it awes and unsettles me. My charge is to propel you toward each zenith for which you’re brave enough to press, while also making myself a nonjudgmental net to catch you when you fall. I mustn’t betray too colossal an expectation, too devastating a disappointment. Your pursuits are your own. Any joy or sorrow I feel as you set forth is mine to manage.

Increasingly, I am coming to understand the act of mothering as a cultivation of temperance. It is a holding-in-check of our most outsized expectations, a delicate calibration of all that we want for our children, all that they are capable of achieving, and all the moments when we each will need to accept a reality that resembles none of those possibilities.

But darling, you make this temperance difficult. How can I filter these bright beams of expectation when you glow so incandescently with promise? How can I allow you field of grass-skipping girldom, when with each day, you invent new reasons for me to spur you toward the sun?

It isn’t easy to wait for the coming years to unfurl themselves like a story quilt and reveal how you’ll evolve. But I will not anger God (or you) by rushing time. Its glacial inching is a grace. I will sip you slowly and relish each talent expanding. My every affirmation will be liberally and patiently seeded. I will make it my aim to know who you are, at any given moment, rather than to trouble us both over all the wondrous things I imagine you’ll become.

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Reconsidering Mary, Mother of Jesus.

My mind can finally fathom Mary. Not her bypassed virginity nor the angel that quelled her fear, not her courage, her confidence in God’s peerless, perfect will nor the charm it must’ve taken to cajole her husband into journeys and mystery and a cessation of questioning.

It is in but one way that I can access her—finally, after all these years of believing her to be beyond my grasp—and this way seems the most significant of all.

I know her by her surrogacy, by the way it feels to give birth to a child to whom she believes she can never stake full claim. I recognize the oddness of feeling a strangulating sense of impermanence, even as I bathe her, feed her, infuse her language with manners, even as she becomes a warm somersault in her sleep, her tiny hard-heeled feet using my body as her gymnast’s mat. Even then, in her sleep, when she feels closest, if only by proximity, I never settle into an impression that she is entirely mine.

Instead, there’s a strangeness, an isolation, in loving a small, breathing parcel who feels so unfamiliar, so separate, so intended for a purpose that sits apart my own, so certainly on loan, and so expected to grow impatient with my heart as her holding pattern, as a velvet-lined cage with a door that will surely stick.

I cannot imagine raising Jesus. This is where Mary seems preternatural. This is our point of departure, for I know that even with a husband who loved me enough to completely overlook that his firstborn is a changeling whose presence is owing to a God he’s never actually seen, and even with the other, more normal children I could pin to the ho-hum, incontestable work of biology, I would not have known how to behave like a mother to him. I wouldn’t have known how to chastise him, wouldn’t have believed I needed to, him understanding God and thus understanding His expectations far more fluently than I. I wouldn’t have known how to love him with reckless abandon.

This is difficult enough with my daughter, who came to me in the most undramatic of ways. No tangible angel preceded her. No voice from heaven boomed. She is not the Son (or Daughter, as it were) of Man and so I can’t possibly feel the pressure Mary must’ve felt to get raising her “right.”

But I feel pressure just the same, not to smother her or to grow too dependent on her company or to make myself her barnacle. She is happy and well-loved; of this I make certain. And she cannot know how motherhood feels, not like an all-encompassing state, not like an eclipse of the light that shone before it, but at times, like only a sliver, like a condition that constantly moves so that it is difficult to pin down, to apprehend, to treat.

And so, I suspect that I do what Mary must’ve done. As often as I can, I abandon the morrow and ignore, for now, the woman I see in the eyes of the girl. I listen to her, noting the cadence and questions that lift at the ends of her prattle. I listen, so that I might know her and, in knowing her, earn her lifelong confidence. When she is ready to flit off into a life I cannot imagine, I believe I will understand why. This is far more important than feeling like she is a wind that I can possess.

I invest, for even my shortcomings have something to teach her. I warn her of the world that awaits beyond my arms and our door. And more than a daughter, I interpret her as an ally–for this is a relation that can remain unwavering. This is a kinship we are never meant to outgrow.

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In Light of the Casey Anthony Verdict.

Story is now 11 months old. She inches her way around the perimeter of our apartment by placing her pudgy palms on knees and toys and furniture, then beams up at me or grins to herself, radiating pride.

She is beginning to communicate intent. When she wants to play or be held, she crawls up, raises to her knees and either pulls up on my pant legs or presses her hands to my shins, looking up expectantly. When she wants to be put to sleep, she lies across my knees.

We share food. I can no longer consume a meal without breaking morsels and passing them to her, like we are sharing the hallowed sacrament. And in my two-seat car, she always rides shotgun, mostly in silence, while we listen to songs from my iPod as though they are reports from a police scanner and we are actors in a buddy cop movie.

I can no longer fathom a life without her. In these long and home-employed summer months, she is omnipresent. I am rarely away from her.

I know what she enjoys, what she can do without, what infuriates her. And in all these ways, she is mine. She belongs to me.

But I do not always feel like her mother.

Fleetingly, in a nanosecond’s passage, I’ll look at her and forget how she grew–pound for pound–in my womb. I forget her delivery room diaspora from the space I’d made sacred and warm for her. And I think, “What a lovely little girl.” As though I’m admiring someone else’s child at a mall or a petting zoo.

It is an unsettling sensation, and as quickly as it rises, it disintegrates. I see her father’s eyes, my lips, her own gapped and scalloped teeth. She touches me or I finger-comb her hair and there is an instant reclamation.

In this manner, I am beginning to understand the complexities of motherhood. It is not as instinctual as we prefer to think. My bond with my daughter has been forged through the repetition of the commonplace; in the ritual of rocking and bathing and feeding, she has become someone I could not move forward without strapping to my back. She has become someone I would willingly relinquish my mind and my freedom to protect or to avenge.

Were I not with her every day of this 11 months, were I to prioritize the pursuit of men or strong drink or of other, errant pleasure, I would be able to conceive of her as someone else’s responsibility. I could leave her–with a parent, a neighbor, an imaginary nanny named Zanny–to pursue my pre-child dreams of a Fulbright or of simply living a life of lonely leisure.

That these are reprehensible ideas rather than palatable ones has more to do with the ritual of presence than the imperative of biology.

I couldn’t follow the Casey Anthony case. I never allow myself to recall to mind the acts of Susan Smith. And I wince whenever Sethe’s “liberation” of Beloved wafts into the foreground of my consciousness.

It is better for me, as the kind of mother I’ve become, not to contemplate the kind of mother I could’ve been, were the chemicals in my brain imbalanced or the condition of my heart compromised.

Instead, at least twice a month, I openly weep, with my daughter in my arms, as we dance across the carpet to a soundtrack of worship songs, and think: there, but for the grace of God, go I.