Lately, children have dusted my life like the first layer of fresh snow: namely infants born to family and friends. I am at that age, as they say, that age being 31. Even now, I’m curled up on my cousin-in-law’s sectional, watching the black-and-white image of their daughter sleeping in her crib. Though I am no one’s mother, I maintain a vigilant peace should she need me. How quickly things can change.
Last week, the black-and-white image I was eyeing showed the son of an old friend as I leaned against her counter sipping anti-inflammatory tea. My friend said that when she doesn’t sleep, she gets sick; motherhood has been an adjustment, her wide eyes seemed to say. It will be the same for me, I thought. Would, I corrected myself, though I was sure I was right the first time. My gaze shifted back to the screen. Her son was sleeping on his back with arms raised, elbows crooked, and hands folded — perhaps clasped — behind his head as if he was reclining on vacation. "That's how I sleep too," my friend said.
In conversations about parenthood, I don’t have advice or stories wrung from my own experience as a mother. In fact, I still identify with the infant, or the toddler. As a child, I resented being talked down to by adults putting on their friendliest voice delivered through an adoring grin. I can still feel the lonely ache that dissolved into panic when my mother insisted on leaving for an evening; on going on a date. Even here, curled up in a home not my own, I can summon the memory of her closeness, of being pressed against her chest as she held me in her lap in the first house where we lived without my father. It would be many years before I could tolerate the absence of that warmth. What little peace she had in those days, came to me in the quiet midnight hours when the lights were low, and our world stayed still.
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