Edition #7: The Unseen Day
An essay on motherhood, forgotten tasks, and the privilege of choice.
I stayed up much too late writing this. It was one of those days that I wish I could bottle up and bring out when the world gets hard, one of those sepia-toned Mondays I missed as each moment passed.
Our children are in a golden age. Our three-year-old is buoyed by her newfound confidence: She can swim! She can ride a bike! She’s learning to spell! Her childhood is well underway, carried by a sensitive blonde dynamo. Her sister, our seven-month-old, is overwhelmed with the excitement of crawling. She’s a petite little thing, newly mobile, and she laughs and cries in a moment. I don’t see myself in her face, but oh, how intimately I know her personality.
A quiet morning with the girls.
Once our children were asleep, my husband and I read together as we usually do, the shush of turning pages interrupted with conversation about our day. He told me about a project at work he’d been working on, so recently a thorn in his side. How it was praised by his superior and caught the eye of the CEO.
“That’s wonderful,” I said, distracted. I was thinking about the lateness of the hour, the clock edging towards morning. I had a six-mile run on the docket and a 5 AM alarm.
He continued. “I saw you cleaned the bathroom today,” he said. “It looks wonderful! Thank you.”
His words were kind. I know so many men who glance over their wives’ work, whether completed at a computer or in the home. Still, sometimes even the right words can split a heart in two.
The bathroom, I thought, I said? That’s what you have to say about my day?
I thought backwards, dredging up the tasks and requirements of my morning. How I wrangled small children through a workout and let our oldest sit on my lap while I checked in on my clients, scheduling emails for next-day delivery. How I put our daughter down for two naps, filled a kiddie pool, caught up with friends and made plans for the week, organized a lake vacation and pulled clothes out of drawers for our suitcases. How I gave myself thirty minutes to clean the bathrooms before I took a break.
Men, I thought. Fathers.
How do we bridge this yawning gap?
My husband and I, two weeks new to parenthood.
Here we are, women. Bodies broken by the act of creation. What we wrought we wear. The lines in our face deepen as we rock babies to sleep, our muscles eaten by the caloric requirement of nursing. Our bodies are torn in two and stitched, hopefully, back together. If we are lucky, our husbands sit or stand or sicken alongside us in delivery rooms. They have the space to sit in awe of our trauma. It was amazing, I’ve heard men say. Wild!
Wild, I wince. Is it bitterness, this emotion? What is this churn in the chest?
I spent two pregnancies horrifically sick. I remember my mother, jaw slack, unsure how to engage with the shell I’d become. How do you describe months of lying in bed? How can you justify the indecency of vomiting, over and over, in your car, over public toilets, in your hair? How do you explain the guilt you feel as, once again, your two-year-old is shuttled off with babysitters, her mother unable to walk? I wept in my room when she was gone. How can you describe such a violent loss of the body to someone who hasn’t carried the burden themselves?
Sneaking a sweet moment with our oldest while I wrestled through my second pregnancy.
Then, there’s the crack of delivery. Our children arrive, red-faced and beautiful. Their throats swell with a voice brand new to the world. We created that, we mothers think. We made that sound. We formed the mouth that mirrors our own and the eyes of the one we love.
Our lives slip into a season of need. More specifically, we are needed. Women’s bodies are scientifically wired to respond to our children. Our brains surge with panic when our baby cries. Oxytocin increases at a greater rate, and cortisol skyrockets. I lay in bed in a panic while my husband softly shushed our screaming newborn. It’s an evolutionary adaptation, this motherly requirement. It’s one of the most intelligent ways offspring are guaranteed survival: cleave to a caregiver.
This is not to say that men don’t respond satisfactorily to their children. I watch my husband soften in the presence of his girls. His love is more naturally expressed through play and afternoon errands, and he is the first person our oldest goes to when she wants to ride her bike or play golf on the lawn. No one can make our seven-month-old giggle like her father. Their bond is beautiful, but different.
When our children are hurt, they cry for their mother.
I treasure this photo. Barely twenty-four hours after my second c-section, our eyes are set on what’s to come.
My sister works in a dementia care unit. She spends her days ushering men and women from one realm to the next, and her ability to engage with final days and last words is meritorious. I could never carry such importance. I asked her once, interested despite myself, what is it like when people near the end? What happens in the thin space between the known and the unknown?
Her eyes softened. The women gravitate to baby dolls, she said. They rock them in the hallways, 90-year-old women, their bodies hollowed and eaten by time, shush their children long since grown. When a woman’s mind cracks, it sends them back in time to their most dependent season. They seek to nurture. The men, however, ask to be nurtured. While women hold their children, men call for their mothers.
I love this photo. Such a young mom! Such a sweet baby!
I have only been a parent for three years, and I carry no torch. I know much less than I think I do, and no high-minded ideologies or parenting books are going to hurtle me towards an arrival. It’s fascinating how a change in daily tasks can compel a reengagement with the self.
This is not my season to tend court in a boardroom. This is not my time to clock in and out, nor to engage in hours of work on a slack-eyed computer. It is a gift, I know. I don't have to sit in a car and commute from one place of work to another; I don’t have to find meaning in a spreadsheet, and I'm not tied to the EBITDA of a company that controls my time. I don’t have to leave my children to fulfill someone else’s capitalist-infused dream. How thankful I am for the choice.
Motherhood, that precious overwhelm.
Instead, my husband does. He manages a data science team and sells real estate and does admirable mental acrobatics with credit card points. We haven’t paid for a plane flight in seven years. He is unflinchingly hardworking, and his steadfastness is a gift. What a joy to be married to a man who supports our family with clear-eyed determination. Our finances are sturdy, our income streams differentiated and consistent. Because of him, I get to choose: work from home, or go to an office? Spend my time teaching the alphabet, or seeking a title?
Every person’s decision is different.
Every decision carries its own value, and its own weight.
I provide for our family with a job I created for myself. I own a business that I manage at the edge of the day, early in the morning, and late at night. I chip away at a novel that gathered dust during a hard year. I read books and raise our children, taking necessary trips to big box stores and planning play dates that make our oldest laugh out loud with joy. Once a month, I use my MFA degree to teach trauma-informed writing at a women’s rehab facility in Nashville. I’m an endurance runner and a yoga teacher and can bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.
And yet.
And still.
On that particular night, on the edge of a compliment, my husband bore the weight of my unseen life. I was tired to tears. Can you say a single thing I do, I asked, an ache in my throat, something I did today that mattered?
The bitterness softens, friends, when we are remembered.
When all this unseen work is uprooted and bursts into light.
Because as I lay there, exhausted and hollowed by a day spent with two wild, precious, imperfectly perfect little women, my husband began to speak. And he didn’t stop.
He reminded me that there was something there I hadn’t seen. He broke open at dusk, telling me about the woman he fell in love with. Not the mother. The person.
He nudged me towards a place so easily cast into the dark.
A photo taken outside our first home in Nashville. We were all of twenty-three and twenty-four, somehow capable of making the best decision of our lives: marrying each other.
There she is, I thought. That bull-headed little girl who came from strong women and is raising strong women. There’s the one. She worked herself to the bone and moved out young and fell in love over and over again, because wasn’t there something magic in the rise, in the fall?
That old person feels far away sometimes. My emotions no longer take precedence, because the impact of my actions matter more. Tiny eyes are watching. They watch me read and write and make dinner and kiss my husband. They watch me stay industrious in the home and in my work, they wake to find me in the sunroom with a book on my lap. They see me light up when they enter a room. Those tiny faces. Those tiny people.
This, for now, is how I’m seen.
How necessary it is to remember.
Weekly Recommendations:
🎧 Architect by Kacey Musgraves: There’s nothing quite like the twang of a country song in the late afternoon. A little achey, a little thoughtful, a whole lot of navel-gazing. I’ll forever welcome the sound of a guitar come golden hour.
📚 Chicxulub by TC Boyle: I think about this short story maybe six or seven times a week. It had a profound impact on me as a writer and as a human. Boyle’s piece allows for the yawning capacity of heartache, and the spark of hope that keeps us all, somehow, together. I’ve read everything TC Boyle has published, and he remains one of my favorite modern authors. If you’d rather listen to the story, you can here!
✏️ Something fun to read: I’m a sucker for a great reno and this Parisian-inspired sunroom is just too much fun. Also, we’re not big drinkers in our home, but these espresso martini pops would add a spark of surprise to a blasé backyard BBQ.
What a joy to share another week with you. These essays are usually quick, somehow jotted down between naptimes and running a business and coffee dates with my husband, but getting something done and in your inbox every week is a joy.