What I've learned from a decade of mothering

Foot Warmer, selling and not selling books, and writing from care

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In a few days, my baby turns ten.

1-0. 10. The double digits. A whole decade of life. 

Ten years ago, I was walking the Ohio woods every day, hand on my belly, watching the dogwoods flower and the shade return. I was sleeping deep, dark, dreamy sleeps in a 19th-century cabin, waking to sit on the porch and listen to the rain move across the valley. I was learning just where the sun fell in the woods in the early morning, where the spiders most liked to build webs, how to be silent so the hummingbird wouldn’t zip away.

I had given up, in many ways, on everything I had spent the last five years so fervently believing in and working toward. After a long spell of flailing and mourning and struggling and then quietness, I let it go. 

I was practicing waiting as an art. I was writing longhand in my journal, running a nonprofit magazine of writing by women, not aiming at anything other than the ragged grace of the now. 

Then my girl came and whoosh, boom, bam, it all disappeared. That whole life was behind me, and there were her big black eyes, blinking. She was fully herself from the go: plucky, curious, quirky, feisty, fierce, and tender. 

It has been the most intense and difficult ten years of my life. Today, we went together to a coffee shop and read. I had a cappuccino and she had a massive chocolate-and-marshmallow-fluff ice cream sandwich that required her to go to the bathroom afterwards to clean her face and hands.

I remembered going to a bakery in Cincinnati with my mom on Sunday mornings, on those precious weekends when I visited her. There was an open kitchen – so excruciatingly cool in the early nineties – and proto-hipsters called out orders for Belgian waffles. We drank hazelnut coffee out of heavy mugs and she read the New York Times and I read the Babysitters Club. 

Now, at the coffee shop with my daughter, I want to work. I want to “get this project off the ground,” as I keep semi-whiningly telling people. As if this project is an airplane and I am trying to push it down the runway while also responding to emails and setting up 4th grade science experiments involving toilet paper rolls and crushed chalk.

The homeschool rhythm we had in place has dissolved as so many activities have ended at the wane of the school year. Now, before summer kicks in, we seem to have vast stretches of unstructured time, so I am jumping on the trampoline and making Play-Doh ramen when I want to be producing an Artistic Work of Great Prestige and Merit.

But I didn’t have enough time to work at the bookstore. Instead, I secretly bought Elena a few graphic novels for her birthday, and a beautiful card with a smiling moon in a shimmery sky that reads, “You are my moon and my stars.” I took her to swimming and finished a few tasks and then Jorge put her to bed and I sat on the back steps and watched the rain. 

I keep envisioning my project as a plane. A glorious and singular invention. A feat and a marvel. Defying gravity, causing the masses to catch their breath and point, awed. 

But what if the project isn’t a plane at all.

What if it is the wind. The rain. The coffee. The life. What if it is what comes when I have given in: noticing the shade coming back. The taste of a blackberry. My daughter’s eyes. What it feels like to be more than do. What it feels like to stay with a very difficult thing when everything else is easier, all the work in the world easier than playing another game of Foot Warmer in which your child sticks her cold feet against your belly and insists you request an exorbitant amount of money to warm them (7 million 9 hundred thousand 57 dollars for two minutes, for example) and then responds she’ll pay in candy and then insists you must turn into an enraged monster saying you hate candy and tickle her ravenously, over and over, more, more. Everything is easier than Foot Warmer – quantum physics, the great American novel.

But for me, all the great work has emerged from care. That care has not been the sideline, the backstory, what the biographers dig up later in tortured letters. My work has come only after I have given in to the care. 

I remember when I was pregnant and my agent wrote to give me the news that my book had not sold. I’d worked so hard on it, done so much reporting and revised and refined and believed in it so deeply, and – nothing. This is the art world. This is how it goes. I put my head on my desk and wept. Fuck it, I thought. Fuck it all.

I took a hike with my dad in the snow and he said, Big deal. Maybe if you’re a brilliant poet you write one poem people remember. Big deal. 

And so I listened to the rain move across the valley. I plodded each day with my big taut belly down the long gravel drive to the mailbox. I waited, I prayed, I learned to recognize persimmon trees and spice bush and mayapples and the songs of red-winged blackbirds and spring peepers. I birthed my baby and nursed her and stared at her little soft, brown face, I cared so hard it rewrote my cells.

And then I sold the book I had written, without caring about money or status or fame, about that care.

Now, here she is, at 10. And when I tickle her during Foot Warmer I see her face at 7, at 5, at 2, and I think, I don’t want to make the mistake I made when she was little. Which was rushing out of that phase of early, rapt attention to try and make myself relevant again. To try and make it make it make it before I realized that, beyond money (very important, yes!), making it really just meant hopping on a treadmill of paranoid and perpetual achievement. 

I remember reading something by Elizabeth Gilbert, and forgive me here for the lack of precision but I haven’t been able to dig it up on the ol’ Internet, about how women go through seasons in their lives. She was on vacation with a friend of many years, and that friend had had children and Gilbert had had marriages and divorces, and there they were, together, in this new season. I loved that. I think of it often.

I remember a reading I did at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison and how a woman raised her hand just to tell me, “You know, you’ll get your self back. It’ll be different, though. Not the same self,” and I almost cried onstage with gratitude for this because though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I knew it was true, and there I was on the stage away from my baby for the first time reading the book of essays I’d published about my baby and it all made sense and was absurd and lovely. Women! I wanted to shout. I adore you! Thank you for your wisdom!

Another older woman told me recently that I would look back on these days and find coherency in them. That I’d feel so scattered and discombobulated and then I would look back and think, oh, yes, mmm-hmmm, and the season would have a form. And I’d feel a kind of fondness and also bemusement at that younger woman so thick in the figuring-it-out she kept telling people at the homeschool meetup and the coffee shop and the swim practice, I just have to get this thing off the ground.

It’s already off the ground. It’s rain on the back steps. It’s my choice to sit and listen. It’s my almost-ten-year-old daughter telling me last night before bed “I let out a quintessential burp, Mom,” and me saying, “Where did you learn that word?” and her saying “You say it all the time, Mom,” and laughing and laughing. Hiking in the park and shaking the rain off the maples onto each other, shrieking. Carving out time for this seeing, trusting that I don’t have to rush, that in the best of all worlds someone will remember me for just one line. For one image. For a gut-punch that made them remember their life for an instant.

Grass and rain and 10 and it goes so fast, and how all the cliches become thorns, because I thought I was so much smarter than them, I’d be the one to outsmart them all, and it turns out I was no different, that the smartest thing may be to trust the season, lean hard into it, know now you’ll look back with such exquisite pain at the time when you had no idea how fast it’d go, she’d be blinking at you with those huge eyes saying “quintessential,” crop top, ice cream crocs, blowing out the candles, and it’s already off the ground going, going, gone, over the green tip of the horizon.