Here
I am here, staring out windows. I’ve been here before. Stuck on the couch under nursing babies, questioning jobs that have become memories under the increasing demands of caregiving. I feel immobile, unproductive, trapped, and very alone. I stare out the window in a desperate attempt to stay connected to the outside world. This is deja vu.
The last 8 years of motherhood have prepared me well for this pandemic, yet I still wrestle with being here, with finding myself amidst the relentless domestic duties of family life, with the discontent that just being a mom is a good enough contribution, with the disorientation of days blending in and out of each other and into an elusive future.
I sit here staring, waiting. Am I waiting to be the next one to get sick? Am I waiting to get on with life? Or am I just waiting for the next moment someone needs me to wipe their bottom? I struggle with doing anything useful beyond the immediate needs.
But maybe that’s the most important work I can do. The immediate work that is right in front of me. How is it possible that I could be most unsettled when living the life that is right here? How could I possibly feel unfulfilled when I have everything I’ve ever wanted right in front of me.
Here is the place where the culmination of all the steps I have taken in life have planted me. Here is a safe, abundant place to be. Here I get to live life with the people I care about most.
While some part of me resists being here, here is where I want to be.
My daughter Charlotte paints a rainbow on the window in the front of the house.
On the day we found out the girls would not be going back to school, Winnie wrapped her hands around her legs in the rocking chair. I felt my uncertainty in her gesture.
Charlotte puts her head down on a book while sunning on the deck. Laundry hangs in the background. The daily ritual of hanging laundry brings me joy. Sunning on the deck brings Charlotte joy. We do this everyday the sun comes out.
Charlotte twirls in the dress that her grandma dropped off for her. She wears it all day, content to be dressed up with nowhere to go.
The kids use their fingers to scrape the rainbow paint off the window. The paint dust created allows an experience of sensory therapy.
Roland puts his head down on the coffee table while standing in a puddle of his own pee. He wears a backpack because he is playing school with his sisters. I have been told I am the teacher. I suppose this still means I am the one who needs to clean up the pee.
I ask Charlotte to photograph me as I comfort Winnie after a tantrum. She holds onto my neck to calm herself.
James walks with Winnie in front of our house. He offered to take the kids outside after he got home from work. I spent all day dreaming of being alone, and yet I am fighting the urge to go out there and be with them. I can’t help but feel resentment that James gets to come home and play with the kids after I have spent the day fighting them to do their work.
Roland picked greenery and flowering weeds from our front yard, thrust them in my face, and said, “Mell dis, mama.” He’s always picking me flowers and shoving them in my face until I stop and smell them.
Charlotte climbs on the window to wipe the paint dust off the ledge after drawing designs on what remains of our painted rainbow. The marks are tallies of our time spent inside these walls. While we often feel stuck here, I am not sure we will want to go anywhere when the world is opened back up to us.