After The Solstice
what no one told me about motherhood was that it would be a continual lesson in change
After the solstice I don’t know who I am. / Late June. / Smoke still in the air. / Wanting something to touch.
6 days now and the fire still going. My daughter wakes at 4 am and because her father did bedtime she is crying Dada come up? Dada come up? Come Up Dada! Come up! And I go to her stumbling up the stairs. I had a bad dream. She tells me. I am up. And I say It’s too early sweetie, it’s time to go back to sleep, it’s not time to get up yet. Staying with her until her breathe deepens. When I dream, it is of a tornado, a train car, and my friend’s little sisters now grown, and I had watched them grow up. Pouring into the bodies that made them women. Most people quit before they get what they want. A writer says. I had lost faith in the word. But I still believed in cinema. The blues weighing down all my edges. My friend’s son finding or me handing my friend’s son the tiny avocado guitar that just plays the blues. The riff of them filling the air, and suddenly four years in, I am back to being just 9 months in and making breakfast in the kitchen - hearing the twang of the guitar from the other room - the isolation of new motherhood so much like the isolation of writing, so very much like the isolation of now. Summer beginning and everyone scattering. What no one told me about motherhood was that it would be a constant change. The sleep regression, the attitudes, the tantrums, yes people told me about those, but not about the friends. (Or my brother tried to tell me but I was already in love.)
When my daughter was 6 months old we went to visit a school near the river, California Oak shading it, laughter I heard every morning while we walked up and down the wide streets a 10 minute drive from our house. When we entered the preschool yard, K. sat there in a patch of sun, with her son in front of her, radiant. Turning her head up and shading her eyes with her hand she said hi. Immediately, I was in love. She was so beautiful I almost couldn’t stand it. Our children born two days apart. A few weeks later she wore an opal to our house and I touched it and said Are you a Libra? I feel like only people with opal as a birthstone wear it. And it ended up we were born a year apart, same day. Of course. Our lives became dinners on the weekends sometimes two or three days in a row. The kids in high chairs covered in salmon and avocado and sweet potato, as we led the charge on the baby-led weaning. As we comforted each other through slow weight gains, and who was crawling and who was walking, and who was talking or not talking. How terrified we all were and I said well we’ve just got to do it. How much in motherhood I have waded through my fears in a way I’ve never waded through anything else, I have so much faith in my daughter’s abilities. How many different things my daughter ate back then, now, just pasta. Then one afternoon, as I was turning up their street, I heard a little voice say careful. It had been almost a year since we met, and Kathleen said, we are thinking about moving. And then my other girlfriend, our daughters born on the same day, said we are moving. And 2 years into motherhood my right and left hand women became a phone call away but no longer just half miles. Still not a day goes by without me missing. R. and I text through the morning and the night. My daughter and I getting on the plane to Utah. My daughter and I driving north. I have made many wonderful girlfriends since but I tell my daughter standing in a new school yard for the summer I’m nervous and excited too, I get to make new friends as well. Standing before a mirror again getting dressed and then undressed, and then dressed, and then undressed, and then dressed again every morning. Feeling old, and not recognizing myself in the mirror, hair short, and too blonde, trying to figure out who I am now. (Still short shorts wearing but significantly more worn down.) The hairdresser saying to me in the mirror This is everything that has existed before the last four years. Holding up some scraggly long hairs that had made it miraculously past my clavicle. And I told her great cut it. Trying to severe what was left of my past, but not realizing how much I was going to miss it. The hard-won length, the waistband of my jeans cutting into my body, and realizing this morning that this is why everyone else I know wears “comfy pants.” The widening of the body after a baby, the widening of a body after being in the world for almost 40 years. My husband telling our daughter, you know who loves making friends, your Mama. And it’s true, I love people. I still dream of people spilling out of our house and into our yard, the record player going, the grill on, the smell of incense filling the air to keep the mosquitos at bay.
This morning eating my daughter’s left over strawberries out of her bowl, too sweet, and wanting to go for a swim. After the solstice, the water so cold the other night, the wind blowing across the sand. Low-ish tide. Dreaming of oysters.
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