There was really not too much about pregnancy that made me
panic the first time around. I knew that
birth would be intense and messy, that sleep-deprivation would be unimaginably hard,
and that a baby would change pretty much everything. But I’ve always been a “cross that bridge when
I come to it” kind of person, and I was so ready for this that things just mostly
felt right.
But one morning as I waddled down the stairs, I caught a glimpse of my empty kitchen table, and at that moment I was knocked in the chest with a giant, terrifying reality. In one of those empty kitchen chairs, I could almost make out the shadowy shape of a grumpy teenager with messy hair slumped over a bowl of cereal. A teenager, who, had he been real and not a figment of my overly hormonal imagination, would have smelled like dirty socks and morning breath. I suddenly panicked. Grabbing the banister rail to balance myself, I said to my husband, “Oh my God. There’s going to be a person living here. Like a roommate, only forever.” And while he reminded me that one’s own child is different from the messy, eccentric person you randomly meet on Craig’s List, the panic would continue to rise in my chest like a frantic flutter of crows trying to get out. This was not just a baby we were having, but whole human being.
I am someone who likes my space, and in order to recharge from the noisy goings on of life, I require a lot of it. I like to drink my morning coffee without talking, I screen phone calls because I often can’t muster the energy to say “hello,” and while I don’t mind being hugged, I’m not one to lean into an embrace unprompted.
At 30, I had finally gotten out of the trafficky, congested space of Southern California, had undoubtedly married the right person, and was living in a cabin tucked among the redwoods where we read and took naps and played jazzy music on the radio. And I was desperately ready for this next chapter, but I was also increasingly nervous about our having to share our space with this unknown person, who I was now convinced was a sullen teenage boy with poor hygiene.
But then our little girl arrived, and I was one of those annoying people who experienced nothing but euphoria, and who felt that being a mother was what I was born to do. And as it turned out, we had birthed a very quiet, calm baby who fit quite nicely into the cozy cabin. The noise she made was fantastic, the spaces she filled were ones that we couldn’t have even known needed to be filled. We did not feel crowded or overwhelmed; we felt (gag) complete.
A friend once told me that babies are born empty, and that we slowly watch them fill with all the things that make them whoever they are going to be. I always remembered that as we watched that bald, wobbly little lump start to smile and roll, sit up, stand and join the world.
And now she’s six, and her fuzzy, rust-colored bird fluff has grown into a long tangle of beautiful orange strands that would be totally gasp-worthy if she would ever wash or brush it. Her feet are dirty, her lean legs are spattered with scabs and bug bites, and she suddenly demands privacy with all things bathroom-related. She is a person. A complicated person with opinions and moods who, I realized the other morning, often sits slumped over her cereal bowl refusing to answer our “good mornings” or other attempted civil pleasantries. Other times, she wakes up as if on some kind of amphetamine, chattering loudly, doing theatrical things with her arms as we slump over our coffee, wincing at the way her energy is rattling our brains against the insides of our skulls.
She leaves her shoes in a pile by every entryway in our house. She interrupts our conversations. She gets into my sewing kit and leaves needles on the floor. The other night, she slid off her chair and writhed around under the dining room table because she felt that we were ignoring her during dinner. She uses way too much toilet paper, despite the many tutorials I’ve given, and she never flushes. She leaves blobs of toothpaste in the sink. Aside from the one college roommate who, it turned out, was sleeping with my boyfriend, my daughter is the worst roommate I’ve ever had.
I mourn those early days when all she wanted was to be pressed up against me. She wanted to wear my shoes and carry my purse, and when she wanted to know what I was doing she’d ask thoughtfully, “Where do, Mama?” In her eyes, I knew everything she needed to know about the world, and we spent much of our days walking quietly, pointing to birds or puddles and naming these things. Even her moods were simple; there was no guessing when she was unhappy and why. We were so physically and spiritually connected that we breathed the same space in the house, and I felt empty when she wasn’t in it.
So I’ve been walking around with this little sadness because she has just begun first grade and has lost a bunch of teeth, and my voice is often hard and tired when I speak to her. We have incentive charts and exhausting discussions about consequences and we still have those goddamn shoes at the bottom of the stairs.
But you know what? Sometimes we also have conversations about whether we believe in God and how people should treat each other and how sad dying is. We listen to audio books in the car and we read Laura Ingalls Wilder before bed and imagine what our lives would be like if we had to make our own cheese. The other day she was telling me a story and she used the phrase, “…when much to my surprise…” and I wanted to hold her against me because it was so sweet (she didn’t let me). She still needs me to lie in the dark with her before she can go to sleep, and she still clings to the nightshirt I wore for the two years I nursed her quietly in the dark. I am secretly hoping she takes it to college with her.
I know that one day I will feel even more confused by her than I do now, and I will mourn these days, the ones we are having now. I know that one day her spastic kid energy will quiet, dipping into teenage melancholy, and I will miss the way she used to use my furniture as a jungle gym (no matter how many times I’ve asked her not to) and how she’d enthusiastically asked me a million questions before 8am and how there were always costume accessories strewn about the house. And this work I do now, of trying to match her erratic, unpredictable behavior with some sort of cause, trying to decode the complicated outbursts and manic emotional swings, will seem simple when compared with what’s to come.
One day I will have my space back, and I will be free to silently drink my coffee and read an entire newspaper. And I know that space will feel much too large and cavernous and dolefully uncomplicated. But right now, there is a person at my kitchen table. She is inexplicably sullen, wildly animated, eerily articulate, maniacally joyful, exasperatingly rigid and breath-takingly beautiful. She is a terrible roommate, (aren’t we all, really?), but as people go, she’s absolutely one of the best I’ve ever met.
