a thing created

Before she was born, Shriekeuse was the gentlest mystery, wrapping us both in a strange sort of insular serenity that nothing could pierce. I knew, in some deep animal way, my only job was to eat and breathe and sleep, so she could float, comfortably brined in amniotic liquid, growing her little cells, dreaming her little fetus dreams.

I was reminded of this the other day in my water aerobics class (oh shut it, some of us require a daintier, low-impact form of exertion) when a rather enormously pregnant woman tenderly lowered her vast bulk into the pool and began languidly paddling about. As the rest of us crunched and twisted and pumped to smooth disco hits of yesteryear, weights on our ankles and giant foam barbells in our hands, this beautifully gravid creature fluttered limply, idly, her gaze fixed inward, the tiniest hint of a smile on her lips.

I had an almost visceral sense of longing for when being a mother was so simple, so peaceful, so sure. (Yes, forgetting all about the heartburn, the hemorrhoids, and the dreaded Hep B swab.) When everything seemed reduced to elementals: water, heat, light, salt. When sleep came swiftly, food was obscenely satisfying, and my belly was full of possibility and hope.

Author and teacher Elizabeth Stone once said to have a child is “to have your heart go walking around outside your body” and while that idea has resonated (with me and the rest of the mommyblogging metaverse) since I first heard it, at that moment in the pool it slammed into me with a tidal force. My heart.

At six years old, Shriekeuse is a new kind of mystery, her own person with her own interior life, no longer that tadpole swimming inside my waistline, no longer that baby gummily stretching my nipples to my knees, no longer that sticky, cuddly toddler with sweetly damp hair and less sweetly damp pull-ups, not even that preschooler proudly displaying her drawings of warbly potato people or fondly caressing my kneecaps in the checkout line. She is no longer physically connected to me, and yet, she is still distantly of me, our umbilicus now relegated to some bizarre astral plane where her joys and sorrows echo in my gut but are ultimately her own.

As she navigates her life, a little paper boat bobbing forlornly in the riptide stream of school and friends and recess, I tidy the flotsam at home, putting Junie B back on the shelf, folding the morning’s abandoned wardrobe attempts, acknowledging the beady stares of her bedridden stuffed animals. I go to the computer and look at old pictures, startled by the near-forgotten rounded cheeks and dimpled fingers, mesmerized by time unfolding image by image across my screen.

I’m quite sure that parents of teenagers would be riotously amused by this weepy little revelation: after all, adolescence is the very definition of excruciating misery for everyone involved, the separation wider, the cut deeper, the connection stretched so thin one just has to take on faith it is still there at all. Even so, age six strikes me as another, earlier fledging stage, where thoughts and feelings aren’t reflexively shared, privacy becomes valued, and intimacy is bestowed rather than assumed.

It is now that she begins to fly. Now that my heart breaks, and soars, and lets go. Just a little. Just for now. Just enough.