I am sifting through a bag of brightly colored pom poms, gathering a little assortment for Sam to float in the moat of glue swirling across the paper in front of him. Glue is something he has only recently discovered and he is especially pleased with the squeezing out part.
This bag of pompoms in my hand is large and full, and I paid maybe a quarter for it at a yard sale. But still I pick through it, taking out a stingy handful and putting away the rest. And as I tuck it back in the sparklies drawer, I become suddenly aware of my own ungenerousness. In this simple act of witholding, I am struck by the very ungenerous nature of my relationship to the world in general. Mostly, I go buzzing along on autopilot, keeping so many things out of arms reach from everyone, anyone in my path, that I don't even realize I do it. I withhold thoughts, energetic connection, affection, conversation, little colored pompoms. And I suppose it's because my default setting is that there will never be enough--that if I use up this whatever it is, I will never have more.
In the best of times now I understand that whatever I need will come to hand in the moment that I need it. But so often these responses, this habitual hoarding, is beyond conscious thought.
Today I have been stingy with my Self. It is one of those days in which I feel like I am a swimming pool from which all of the water has drained away. What's left is a hard bottom covered with dirt and old leaves. And if you try to jump in, you will crack your head because I have nothing left in me to cushion your fall. So I keep myself bent inward and I vibrate outward a palpable warning that the pool is closed today.
But Sam doesn't do closed. If mama is at the bottom, he will jump in, jump on, jump over. And if he cracks his head on my hard edge, that crack is mine to fix and so I will, because that's what mothers do. Even in that moment when it feels like there is nothing left, the mother's heart always has something stored away somewhere, something unexpectedly, perfectly enough for whatever task is at hand. And I am slowly coming to have faith in this simple fact. But sometimes everything inside me screams for solitude and it is hard to hear any other thought over the screaming.
For so long before Sam was born I lived in what now seems like a hermetically sealed bag, never really making contact with the outside world. My favorite vacation was to go into the desert for weeks at a time and revel in not speaking to another soul. I have never, ever even attempted to be present with another human being day in and day out, be responsible to and for that person, always be aware of his thoughts, bodily functions, needs, wants, bumps and scrapes. I wasn't even aware of those things for myself in the times before motherhood and there are days when I am completely overwhelmed by this, when the energy and dedication it takes to simply remain present is enormous. I don't know how other women do this so easily, how it comes to them so naturally. But I see that it does, that it can, that it will in its own time.
So I put the bag of pompoms back on the table, open the sparklies drawer all the way and start pulling things out. I find a little tupperware tub of odds and ends, saved from the fairies I made while waiting for Sam to emerge, and begin again to pick out a stingy handful. Then I catch myself and set the tub next to the vast spread of his glue smeared paper.
He reaches for the tub, picks it up, dumps the whole thing in the middle of that glue, smushes it around with his hand and declares it done.
And that is, in fact, how it's done.
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