image credit: Canva
This essay was originally written for and selected for publication in The Kindred Voice online magazine as part of their annual “write your story” challenge 25.04.20.
Issue: — Vol. 3: Self
Of all moments to find a new little piece of myself, it was in the midst of a diaper change, or—yes—more like a wrestling match with my nearly two year old.
The usual tenderness had drained from my hands, and they started to hold frustration. Yanking a diaper from the drawer, I sank away, quietly lost in my impatience the more he fussed and cried, until l burst with “let’s just get through this!” I cringed at my temper. He wiggled and cried some more.
Out of nowhere though he stopped his flailing and tears at once.
“Mama?”
I was jolted right out of my exasperation, and I hovered there in the immediacy and unmistakable searching of his call.
For days—weeks—after, I listened to the ways he’d say “mama,” more aware of his reaching for me in my musings.
I brushed up against my deepest fear of leaving him alone and stranded when he needs me most. And I was thrust into distant memories to when I felt most isolated, in my own search for my mother when she’d be a stranger to me through the fog of her addiction unable to pour her love into me as she always did otherwise.
But he had reached me, beneath the incompletion, self-doubt, guilt, and disconnect I often slink into, a part of mySELF, the self that is true, free of all the voices and stories on top of me. That no matter how fragmented and lost that little girl inside me has felt, there is still a piece that is whole enough for him to be enfolded. She is so completely rooted that he can call out and find her, the inner mother, who I wasn’t sure existed.
This little being in all his wild toddlerness is constantly inviting me with every whine, laugh, tear, screech, giggle, and defiant pout to this presence. When he says “mama,” he is grounding himself in me, and it grounds me too. I am listening…Just after I’ve had my coffee.