As of yesterday, both of my children—for the first time since becoming a mother—are in school. I come home to an empty house. Immediately pull out my tiny wooden one hitter, fill its mesh bowl with remnants from the bottom of a jar a friend gave to me last summer: it’s rare that I smoke these days.
The silence is ecstatic. I do jumping jacks through the hallway, get myself some tea. Still iced, but we’re teetering toward the kettle. We’re at that sort of twilit fulcrum between seasons where my husband and I wage invisible battle via thermostat. He turns it way up. I turn it off. He turns it back on. I don a sweater & sigh dramatically.
I see this meme of a tweet (am I old? what to call this?) circulating that says, “the smell of fall has the faintest bit of grief in it,” or something along those lines & I simply
cannot relate—
This is my personal most wonderful time o’ year. I adore the slightest chill. The potential for a bonfire. The pause before the descent. Back to school reset mind & refilling of supplies. Jelly pens & big erasers. New vigor towards the inward & inspiration towards lunch. It’s the getting back down to it that really gets me going.
Or maybe its that tiny scent of grief that turns me on, like it sates some ache for a fuller gradient of feeling. I’m not good at the saturation of summertime: it’s not because I don’t love fun I do trust me I do it just the spectrum of all things is more difficult to feel in constant, direct sunlight. And it’s precisely this sunlight I know I will sincerely miss. But it’s the missing that I like I guess. It’s the yearning I’m after.
Of course I wept after dropping my youngest at his first day of school. We’ve been together all this time. I’m hearing the phantom padding of his clumsy footsteps and echoes of crying throughout would-be nap time. Motherhood is one of the most profound joys I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. But coming home to an empty house; to an enclave of space & time; getting to re-encounter my Self in solitude, is undeniably another.
In the beginning of this parenting journey, not being able to carve out adequate space for myself was by far the most difficult part of the transition. Four years in, and it is still the hardest part.
Maybe this will trigger some who believe we should all martyr the whole of ourselves to The Mother. Certainly some don’t experience the same sheer need for solitude as I do. Don’t hold it as such an essential means of reconnecting, resetting, recharging. And of course some people—mothers included— don’t believe in other mothers having an identity apart from/as profound as that of Mother. But I am uninterested in that discussion.
What I am interested in sharing is something about the way we do (re)turn to the Self, even in the midst being a Mother. Even whilst inside the gauntlet of joy and beauty and holding and soothing and feeding and cleaning and preparing and worrying and praying and redirecting and gently saying it again and again and remembering and playing and ever self-regulating and caretaking each detail relentlessly and relentlessly bringing attention to each moment. And within each moment: trying to capture it. Trying to cherish it. Trying to imbue it with intention and some sort of purpose the child will carry with them. Or something like that. Enough at least to tell yourself you were there; mama tried.
One thing about me is this mama is a terrible trier when she doesn’t have sufficient time to empty. A tired grouch, a shortened fuse, an unimaginative playmate at best. But even a tiny hit of this here solitude re-members me to a deeper feeling of Self—and a tiny hit of weed doesn’t hurt either.
In July I was blessed with a mini-divination from Selah over at Four-Queens, during which she asked: What does motherhood as a liberation practice look like? How does your ability to be a sovereign, creative force factor into your Mothering?
And my answer is exactly this: when I get to sip from this deeper, fuller, truer Self, I get to address the evermorphing ache head on—instead of ignoring it so that it rots inside me, potentially breeding a slew of spontaneous mini pumpkin-like aches for future me to deal with. And yet, tending to the ache doesn’t mitigate it, because like any seasonal life force, the ache doesn’t leave. It shifts & mutates, revolving all in its path. It redirects & changes focus.
Inversely, when I do get a break from my children, when it is me and only me with my ache, I ache not for my Self, but for the children. All of them. The children all over the world; the ones being shot in schools or bombed in deserts or starved in tents or stolen from their homes or groomed in broad daylight or neglected by the ones who are meant to protect them. For the unalived and unborn and unloved. I scroll through their faces before going to sleep at night. I suppress my nausea at the way in which we have failed them; are failing them all. I don’t have anything poignant to say about it. Nothing new, nothing wise. Just ache. I don’t know how to engage these days with *the horrors of the world* on social media. All I know how is to ache.
And usually by the end of a good bout of solitude [writing, stretching, breathing, being] the ache redirects towards my own kids and I miss them just how I like to. Just how I miss the sun in early autumn: when it’s not been long enough gone to grieve cause it was just here and here so monotonously I could barely pull focus toward anything else and yet, now that it is not, I can only think of nuzzling myself into its soft bright neck. Feel it fully on my face again. Turn my nose up & give thanks.
G
PS:
For more on mothering, check out the other Substack project I am a part of: The Mothers Grimm.