I’ve lost the shirt that I’m wearing in this picture, black and sleek with swans splashed across it. I wore it into the ground, I’m sure, thrown into the washing machine with no question of a delicate cycle or air drying it. The hem frayed, I think, and soon enough it went into the pile of things that go into piles of other things. I don’t know where it is now.
In the picture I am cradling my son, just home from the hospital, and my hands can wrap around his tiny body in its orange vest and the gray fox onesie we bought months before. We didn't know if it would fit him by the time we came home because we didn’t know when we could come home. We bought it in newborn at first, and then in three months, and after all of that he wore the newborn one home.
I’m in old jeans, dark and loose around my legs in the picture. You can almost but not quite see my smile, the way I feel holding him in our tiny room in our tiny house, after so many days of holding him in his nest of wires and tubes and beeps.
Stop the world.
That’s the song I’m singing right now - do you know it? Stop the world, take a picture. It’s from Come From Away, the musical I wept through two weeks ago. How can I explain that this is what I was thinking of when I was watching two people sing and fall in love and I was weeping with my fingertips pushing at my chest like I wanted to rip out my heart, my mouth open, the tears pouring down. This is the song I was hearing and now it is the song I am singing.
In this picture, when the world is stopped, I see that I was becoming his mother, not through a magical moment of skin on skin or midnight feed, but in the awe and work and agony. I was becoming not a mother but his mother, all that particularity of pronouns important. I was his, I belonged to this child, this human being, all tiny fingers and toes and tracheostomy tube. I belong to Jack, and Jack belongs to me.
Stop the world.
Tomorrow marks six years of belonging to Jack, and six years into becoming a mother, and I am only more sure now than I was then that it is a constant present - tense thing, to become more and more this thing, mother. I look at pictures then and now and I see it: becoming. When we came home that November day I was angry with myself for not already knowing how to be a mother, and not already knowing how to swaddle, to hold, to comfort, to protect, to rise again and again in the night, to keep vigil by a crib with a pulse oximeter for company and a humidifier hum as constant background noise. I was angry with myself for not having already known how to do it.
The pictures are not a promise, not that I already was or wasn’t, but that I was becoming it, present tense, that I was rising, present tense, that I was swaddling and holding, comforting, protecting, I was searching for ways to already be but the only way is through the actions, thousands and thousands, hidden behind this picture. Thousands of trach changes, dressing changes, thousands of night feeds, of books read, of extra hugs, of night lights lit against the dark, of drives across I-35 to Temple and back, of Elephant, and Piggie, and the ceaseless love that is offered to me in his smile and his twinkling eye and his dance.
We become by becoming.
And we are.
Such a good theme for my day, today. I am…becoming a grandmother. It is a struggle. I want to move in with them, no, not really. I want to be there every second, no not true. I relish their “becoming”! Just the three of them. But I struggle. Will they allow me to visit, enough. I want to buy things, but no, there are too many things that get bought. Trying to figure it out. Oh, and then there’s this pandemic. And they are cautiously on overload. And I’m trying to be everything, they want me to be.
Thank you Hilary, for the refocus of my thoughts today. And reminding me, I have a lifetime, of learning, and becoming, a grandmother.
My grandchild is due to arrive on the “outside” in eight weeks. But, I sure did enjoy sitting next to this precious child at mass on Sunday. Seems he slept through the entire service, it must be really comfortable, on the inside. 💝