The Spaces in Between

5:30 am

My 5-month-old daughter is congested for the third time since her birth. She won’t nurse because she can’t breathe through her nose. I take her into a hot shower and clear her nose as she sneezes and coughs out the mucus. I take her downstairs to nurse where she won’t wake up the house. She falls asleep in my arms, a milky smile lingering at the corners of her perfect lips. I fade in and out of wakefulness, my head resting on the big, white armchair that holds us both. I pray I can be enough for her. I pray she’ll never stop wanting to hold my hand.

10:45 am

My 5-year old daughter is telling me a story: “‘Maryland, Maryland,’ they cried, as they climbed to the top of the RV. And then they made a delicious dinner in the RV and went to sleep in their tents.” I’ve been teaching her state names, and she’s been listening to her dad and me talk about our dream of taking the kids to national parks in a travel trailer. Most days, it feels like an impossible dream. But then I think about how I was once diagnosed with infertility and how all four of my daughters are impossible dreams made real.

1:15 pm

My 2-year-old daughter has just finished pretending to eat the mushroom picture in “That’s Not My Hedgehog.” Now, she’s folded her chubby hands and is trying desperately to keep her eyes closed while I recite “The Guardian Angel” prayer. Her face is scrunched in the attempt, and she opens one eye and then the other to see her dad coming in to kiss her before her nap. “Daddy! Hel-lo,” she exclaims, rolling her “l’s”. She points to me, saying, “Mommy!” then to him–“Daddy!” then to her baby sister in my arms: “Baby!” She has never known what it is to grow up without father, mother, brother and sister. She hugs her new baby sister like they are best friends. She doesn’t know her oldest sister is in heaven.

7:30 pm

My 9-year-old stepson is asking me what the terms “heart attack” and “execution” mean. He’s referencing a book he borrowed from Grandma where someone has a heart attack. He’s trying to understand the historical context of Jesus Christ’s life and death. I try to explain blood flow and vital organs. I try to explain Roman outposts and colonization. I think about how long into young adulthood it took for death to become real to me. I think about how I hope it takes longer for him.

10:15 pm

It’s been 3 hours, and our newborn is finally asleep. Her screams are still ringing in our ears, and my back is throbbing from walking and rocking her. I’m frozen with fear of waking her up, fear that this tiny nursing strike will turn into a big one, fear that my milk isn’t enough to keep her safe every time illness enters our home. My husband silently rubs my left leg, seeking to soothe the nerve pain that developed during my third pregnancy. He squeezes my hand, afraid to speak, afraid to wake our baby, afraid because he sees my reserves running low. He lets me know in every way he can that he’s still there; our marriage is still there; our friendship is still there. That they’re waiting quietly in the spaces in between.

You lose yourself in motherhood. I think it’s pretty much inevitable, especially if you have close spacing between your kids. The physical, emotional, and mental toll is so overwhelming that it practically constitutes identity theft.

Once upon a time, I was a little girl who won first place for my snowman family drawing in a middle-school art contest. Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away, I was a rebellious teenager convinced that I was Juliet in love with a Montague. Twenty years ago, I stood on the sea cliffs on the west coast of Ireland and dreamed of becoming the next Louisa May Alcott.

Twenty years ago, I stood in front of a 4,500 year-old Irish portal tomb and wrote these lines:

And still I stand stranded on
this turtle-plate shell of land
a homo sapiens sapiens
screaming silence across
forty-five hundred years
of root and cave and sea
howling for absolution—
abnegation from the 
spangled solace that
shivers and taunts—a 
night-lettered sky
spent aching in
perpetual want.

Yes, I yearn for you
as wool-dyed red 
cradles my throat
coat gulping 
gaping against
empty shell 
of breast—bone—
ears pulsing with the
turbid tide of rock—
song—shallow 
hips shushing the want
that burrows, bristling
without skin—hair—
nails dancing to smooth
the creased concern
of too few breaths
to know endurance—

Shuddering for you 
to crawl and comb 
your thundered path
through vein and marrow
cell of lip and tongue
shiver of eye and brow
ecstatic eulogy of bone—
gasping prayer
on steadfast feet
that this tomb before me
will shudder and singe
and in one touch 
breathlessly 
incarnate
within my
womb.

- "Poulnabrone Dolmen", The Burren, West Ireland  

Something about that semester abroad woke me to the reality that I wanted to be a mother. Ireland was the land of my grandmother and great-grandmother’s births. Ireland was where my voice, my heart and my body seemed to magically all work in unison. Ireland was where I dreamed of taking my first daughter after she turned one. I dreamed of taking her to the Burren, to Poulnabrone Dolmen, reading her my poem, and telling her that this place is where I first dreamed of her.

When my first daughter was born, I felt I had finally become who I was meant to be. That motherhood was my identity. Now, eight years after her birth, I feel that motherhood has robbed me of my identity. That all that I am is Mom. Always Mom. Only Mom.

It feels legitimately unjust that something that has the power to fulfill you so utterly also has the power to make you feel so helpless–or worse–so trapped. So many strangers lately have made passing, yearning comments about how every day with little ones “feels like an eternity” but it all passes by so fast. I think about the growth rate of an embryo, who, in nine, short months becomes a full-term newborn. Then I think about the growth rate of a newborn, who, in one, short year, becomes a crawling or walking toddler. I agree that it all passes by so fast.

But I also know that when it is all that you do, it begins to feel like all that you are, and you become a stranger to yourself.

In your children, you can see small echoes of yourself as a child, an adolescent or as a twenty-something-year-old ready to take on the world. It makes you smile, then it makes you cry, then it makes you work harder to fix the world for your children… then to fix your children to prepare them for the world. It’s a monumental task–an impossible one–and you drown in trying to accomplish it. Then you wake up the next day and swear to yourself that you’ll try harder today, and–today–you’ll be successful.

For all of my adult life, my faith has told me the family is a microcosm of the Church, of the whole world–of the universe. By this logic, I understand that what I’m feeling is just the human experience, of being driven to accomplish the impossible, knowing you’ll fail, and driving yourself harder day after day.

The original Hebrew term for “sin” is “to miss the mark.” The story of human beings trying to do what cannot be done and falling short is perhaps the oldest story we have.

We live our tiny version of this story and like to believe in the impact it could have on the whole of humanity. We like to believe that we matter and that happy endings are possible. It’s hard to swallow the dichotomy that, in some ways, we matter acutely and irreplaceably, and, in other ways, we matter not at all.

As parents, we matter to our children. We matter so much that our failings and mistakes directly (and sometimes irreversibly) impact these tiny beings that we, as mothers, grew inside of our bodies. We matter so much that our children will mimic our strengths and our weaknesses, and we watch the reverberations of our genetics play out like some absurd Greek tragedy.

Parenthood has a momentum all of its own that will always move faster than we can, particularly if our bodies or brains are crippled or ailing. We will always be doing less than we planned on doing, on resting and recovering more than we wanted to and on struggling to hide how totally incompetent and unsuccessful we feel most of the time.

My dear friend visited with her three children this past weekend. Between her and us, we have seven children running around, which is always chaotic and also a ton of fun. After the kids go to bed, we have some grown-up drinks and conversation. I’m always grateful for these hours–even if we spend a lot of that time complaining about our lives–because it takes me out of my vacuum and helps me gain perspective.

My dear friend has three beautiful children, close in age, who function as a single, cohesive unit. They are well-behaved, obedient, respectful, sweet-tempered, intelligent, and great with babies/toddlers. They come from an unbroken family and play together constantly and effortlessly. From my blended family perspective, I feel like my kids are a mess compared to hers.

She has known me for 20 years. We met as college roommates our freshman year. She knew me as the writer, the rebel, the convert and the prima donna. We traveled abroad together our junior year and walked down the aisle as each other’s maids of honor. I know that when she sees me or speaks to me, she’s seeing 20 years of me, pressed like cookie dough into a Mom-shaped cookie cutter.

Astoundingly to me, she struggles with many of the same parenting challenges as I do–though perhaps less obviously or dramatically. She feels many of the same frustrations and has similar sources of guilt and anxiety. For me, it’s critical to know that she (and presumably other moms) holds herself and her children to similar standards, has similar struggles with behavior and obedience, experiences moments of intense exasperation, and, sometimes, even falls into straight-up despair.

When I look at her, I cannot see her suspended in the vacuum of motherhood, even though she’s been a mother for 11 years to my 8. In her face, I see ripples and rivulets of my best friend watching the sun set over the Cliffs of Moher, hair curling with salt and wind, lungs swollen with terror and delight as the ocean thundered below–much too far and far too close to feel any sense of safety.

Once upon a time, she too dreamed of being a mother, a teacher, and a writer. And she is all of these things, although the teacher and writer have only filled the spaces in between her motherhood over the past 11 years. I can still see these in-between places in her face, now carved with pain by questions like, “What if she ends up like me?” or “How do I keep him innocent for just a little bit longer?”

I know this because I see the same lines in my mirror, eyes sunken with fear that I could have done more and horror at realizing that even my best will never be enough. Sometimes, I wake up and flex my hands slowly before my eyes, remembering the hours I spent drawing and painting with those hands as a child. I see phantom band-aids, blisters, and blood from years spent battling hand eczema. I see the instruments I used to change a thousand diapers, soothe a thousand tears and lift four babies from breathless sobs into toothless joy.

I know that most of the energy, vitality, strength, and will to change the world has been funneled directly into growing my daughters in my body, nourishing them at my breasts, and standing as a bulwark between them and the thousand darknesses this world harbors. I say this without regret or resentment; this is simply who I am now.

I am teacher, warrior and protector. I am the artist who draws boundaries for my children and the wolf who nips at their heels when they cross those boundaries. I am the gardener who teaches my children how to sprout seeds and the medicine woman who sits with them as they cough, vomit, or sweat into the long and empty hours of the night. I am the witch in the tower, praying that no one will break my magic mirror and reveal exactly how incapable I am of ruling this land.

I have had two babies in three years. I have spent my entire marriage to my husband either pregnant or breastfeeding.

Most days, the muscles in my upper back feel permanently tensed from eight years hunching over, cradling a child. Sometimes, I fantasize that these muscles are where wings would sprout if I could fly. And then I think that if I sprouted wings, I wouldn’t use them to fly away. I’d fold them around my children and allow them to be plucked bare and bleeding before I let an arrow through.

The nickname I use most often for both of my youngest daughters is “angel.” When I pray to my daughter in heaven, I call her “angel.” But mothers are angels too. Not sinless and luminous like our babies, but valiant and brightening, veterans of too many wars to number, guardians of that which is most precious and pure. Mothers stand at the gateway between life and death, channeling their own life into creating and protecting their children. It is this endless self-sacrifice that makes us lose who we are, and, in the process of losing, find a deeper identity.

If there are days that I cannot find myself, there are more days when I feel that everything that I do matters–that I matter–and that I am shaping reality for these irreplaceable little people in ways that I never could have shaped it for strangers through my career or vocation. If there are times that I mourn the person I once dreamed of becoming, there are many more moments when I feel intense gratitude that my life is a life of service instead of self-seeking.

My children have taught me more about who I want to be than 22 years of formal education. And if I don’t have time or space to think about being more than a mom, it’s because, for me, being a mom means more than anything else.

And there will be time for those dreams, as everyone keeps telling me. Time when they are older and pursuing their own dreams. A short, sweet symmetry of time when their pursuit of their dreams and my pursuit of my dreams could potentially coincide before they begin to have their own children and my life as a grandmother begins.

Since the birth of my fourth daughter six months ago, my 5-year-old has been talking about how the baby in her “chest” is making her back ache and how she needs to “nurse her baby” down for a nap. My 2-year-old takes her baby “dolly” for walks in the doll stroller and solicitously tenders dropped toys and books to her new baby sister.

Sometimes, as I braid the hair of my 5-year-old or help my toddler pick out a dress for church, I am stunned by the remembrance that my daughters carry the eggs of my potential, future grandchildren in their tiny, perfect bodies. I pray that I will live long enough to listen to my daughters complain that they have no time to do anything other than mother their children.

This time is precious, strangers keep telling me. It passes too slowly and too quickly. I can hear the regret in their voices. The yearning.

Each morning, I wake to the exquisite coos of my youngest daughter examining her feet and telling me what she sees. I nuzzle her neck and press kisses to the milky sweetness of her mouth. I tell her how wondrous she is and how grateful I am that she came here to be with me. Her eyes glint like starlight.

I have had these moments with each of my four daughters, these blissful, brief encounters when they are too young to be busy immediately upon waking. With each daughter, I have not known if she would be my last.

Today, my 5-year-old wants to read me a 10-minute story that she makes up as she goes. My 2-year-old wants me to watch her pick out her own clothes and get dressed all by herself–all of which may take up to 20 minutes. My 6-month-old doesn’t like to spend more than 30 minutes out of my arms when she’s awake.

Today, I won’t make any money, lose any weight, or get enough sleep. My life is governed by bath toys and bedtimes stories, by dirty high chairs, tricycle rides and an aching back.

Tonight, I will fall asleep to the dreaming tug of my infant at my breast and the feather-light grasp of her tiny hand around my forefinger. I will wake to nightmares of enemies trying to take my children and soothe myself back to sleep by planning out the cake I want to make for my 2nd daughter’s 6th birthday.

Tomorrow, I’ll have moments of feeling like villain, victim, and hero of my own story. I’ll pity the child I once was and run away from memories of my early adulthood. I’ll text my best friend and tell her “thank you” and “I love you” and hope that she knows how much I mean in each of those statements. I’ll kiss my husband and tell him how he’s made all of my most important dreams come true. How having babies with him is the greatest adventure of my life.

And then, God willing, I’ll continue to wake each morning to the sweet faces of my three living daughters and come to peace with the reality that being “just Mom” means far more than being just Caroline ever did.