I was reading an essay recently and I cannot tell you a single detail about where I read it or who wrote it. Those details did not stick. I can only tell you that the writer wrote something along the lines of how you should not consider your children an extension of yourself and then things went fuzzy for me. Those words strung together felt like grit in my teeth, like something I wanted to spit out and rinse clean with cold water. They made absolutely no sense to me.
Just the other morning, Sully reached up for me to pick him up and I scooped his deliciousness up right there in the kitchen, Sunday morning bacon sizzling on the stove behind us. We didn't share conversation, just a few quiet moments where our hearts beat together. I stole long inhales of that soft wrinkly spot on his neck, just below his ear that smells like little boy, sweet, heaven. Before long he wiggled his way out of my arms and made a mad dash in the direction of the sound coming from his dad and brother goofing around in another room, and I watched him go running in nothing but his little-too-big underwear, pulling the invisible threads of my heart along with him.
On another day recently, I came across words on a sticky note stuck to my desk. The last I saw, it was like two little stick figures hauling the couch cushions up a staircase. No big deal but a big deal. Because I watch them come and go from me, all the while pulling that thread that is our collective heartbeat in and out of moments. These beautiful, blessed things.
We are on the front porch. It's been a day of long moments just the way summer days can be. But it is behind us now as we sit, cooled down, savoring root beer floats together, watching the butterfly and the bunny. I wake up each day and we do it all again. And some days, like yesterday and today, I am tired. So tired. There's tattling, name calling, hitting and voices raised much too high, and oh my god, didn't we just do this fifteen minutes ago? Tired. We are not exempt.
Yesterday I watched them snuggle up together on the couch, all leggy and little boyish watching a cartoon. I stood in the kitchen cutting up a watermelon, and there it was again - that invisible thread between us that never goes away, not even slack. These fibers of life bind us together. They are my story and my truth - a love and passion that goes so deep I cannot measure it. They are the soft linen I rest my head on at the end of each day and run my fingers gently across, the beautiful lines of mad moments and blissed out moments and the gratitude that is my life. In the middle of all this is where I pray.
Mother.
Of course I am more, but I am that. They will always be an extension of me.
