making space amongst the mess
I am surrounded by stuff: mounds of books and boxes filled to the brim, nearly too heavy to move. Not one thing is where it usually is- nothing ‘belongs’ anywhere anymore. Three lives, summed up in cardboard, shipping tape and bubble wrap. The beginning of our voyage from North Carolina to Maine.
The baby sleeps. This is the reason I am here putting pen to paper. Fingers to keyboard, as it were. I’ve lost the luxury of writing by hand for the time being. My free time is precious, and a pen can hardly keep up with my thoughts the way a keyboard can. I imagine I’ll regain the art of penmanship once our 9 month old is in school. We have a ways to go.
Motherhood has bequeathed me a surprise super power, one that I have been honing every minute of every day for the past 9 months- my brain is able to focus through a magnificently small lens. If I look up, I’ll see the mess- remnants of our lives, cast about the room, creating a sea of ‘to-dos’. I will abandon this ship in quest of personal pleasure, my writing left haphazardly moored. My focus, thus, is simply this screen. This keyboard. A bit of lap. One phrase repeating in the recesses of my brain- “don’t look up”.
This is parenthood. Stolen moments my only avenue to the person I once was. A daily mantra of “I should”s, paired with hourly reassessments of “I need”s. A constant showing up for others, on the verge of breaking down, until I pause for a deep breath in. That’s when I see the storm forming in the distance, the immediate need for space and quiet and time for myself. It is in these moments of pause when this sea on which my child’s boat floats begins roiling formidably. In moments such as these, I must steal away from the togetherness and the mess, even just to the next room, even still surrounded by tasks calling for my attention. I write to process. To calm the waves. To part the oncoming clouds.
I have figured out how to find time for myself, but rarely time enough. There is always some task — the laundry, the dishes, the packing up of three lives — that I must ignore, if I am to have any time at all. This is a battle against my inner perfectionist. I view defying my inclination towards ‘perfection above creativity’ to be an act of activism- a sort of stand, a declaration of self, a meeting of ones needs that goes against the societal conditioning that a mother should and must put her family’s needs above all else. Namely, herself. This form of activism is entirely necessary for a content and peaceful home.
I find it more and more imperative to recognize when I need time for myself well before there is a storm brewing in the distance. My ardent hope and greatest undertaking within this role of ‘mother’ is to teach my child that creativity and imagination (in whatever form these things unfold) is of the utmost importance. That they are necessary, like food and water and shelter. If you scoff at such a sentiment, I wonder if you have ever, truly, had that part of your flame snuffed. It is a painful thing, and leaves one a hollowed version of themselves. Taking (and making) time for myself is as much for me as it is for my partner, my baby, even the dog. No one in our home is optimally content when I am spent past my last dime. I believe this is probably true in families everywhere.
I do not feel the need to insert some squawk about loving my child. Obviously I do. A more pointless observation there never was. Mothers can love their children and want to be away from them, to be together and be autonomous, miss them even as they want space from them, hand them over to their partners and ache as they do so, all for the sake of the rejuvenation that comes from an hour alone, engaging with whatever art form allows for optimal flow.
And so, I put off cleaning the mess, packing up the house. Soon the baby will wake, and I will play the games for cognitive growth, chop the vegetables for supper, wipe yesterday’s crumbs from the table. I will do the chores that come along with parenthood, that eons of ancestors have done before me. And I will be all the more grateful for it, after an hour spent with my thoughts, my breath and my journal.
