The Truth I Carry

My boys, Jason and Dom, and I are hiking Northfield Mountain in rural Western Massachusetts. It’s the Sunday after Hurricane Floyd and the sky couldn’t be bluer. Northfield Mountain is a fake mountain built over a powerhouse, but it’s the first woods the city girl inside me could trust and navigate when I moved here fifteen years ago. My sons both walked these trails in my belly and on their own. They caught every frog in the pond and counted long lines of red salamanders in migration, picking each one up a moment to stroke its fine, soft belly before letting it go on its way.

Today we are half way up the mountain and have come across part of a new ropes course—a tire tied between two trees. There should be four ropes holding it steady—two on top and two on bottom—but Floyd untied one bottom rope and now the whole thing is unsteady as sand.

Dom, ten years old but always my baby, wants to try it and I automatically assume he’s too small.

“The ropes are too wide,” I say as he jumps on and fits. His arms and legs are muscled from a summer’s worth of play. His torso is spread open like a kite. I’m confused because I can’t remember when he got big enough.

As Dom tries to move, his natural grace gives in to his need to be first. He hurries and his steps are stymied. His brother Jason, five foot seven at thirteen, steps in. He calls out slips of instructions: “Left hand up, right foot out,” he says in a voice that’s slowly deepening. Even my tone deaf ears can hear those changes.

The sunlight through the maples shows me Jason’s reshaping, the slow turns of his body, so that his arms are now like eagle wings—remarkably long when they’re unfolded. His waist is a world all its own.

When my mother visited in August and we prepared to go out for dinner, Jason’s dress clothes had shrunk somehow. His pants ended mid-shin and the waist gapped by five inches at his belly. His vest cropped at his ribs and his shirt’s last button was a hand above the pants’ waistline. While I stood trying to process it all, my husband calmly opened his own closet and dressed Jason in men’s khakis, shirt, socks and shoes that fit perfectly.

Dom and Jason have crossed the ropes safely and are waiting. Now it’s my turn. I step onto the bottom rope and pull the top one close to my chest. Two boys, who are too big and capable to be my babies, are smiling and clapping me on from the end. Though the ropes are firm under me I have never felt more off balance.

* * *

It was a good thing I never thought too much about mothering. How the two tiny ones that grew inside me might have to be pulled into this world through a hole in my belly. (They did.) How children could be such extraordinary teachers. (They are). How the predictable rhythm of our life after our first baby came might trick me into feeling like an expert. (It did).

Even before he was named, Jason taught me to be confident. He sent bubbles into my belly at four months to say he was okay. The elbows and knees that repositioned like clockwork at eight months was another message. The basketball that my uterus hugged that July was him too. And even though he arrived surgically, shortly after midnight under a sky my husband said looked full of diamonds, this child was fine. Just as he’d been telling me he was for the past nine months. He was fine. A boy. Jason.

He was the one who followed the directions the baby books laid out. He cried when he needed me, hushed when I cradled him, breast fed like a pro, slept through the night at eleven pounds or six weeks, whichever came first (eleven pounds).

He wove me a sturdy rope when he called me “Mom.” I felt “Mom” completely, from the lentil soup on the stove to the sweet potatoes on the ceiling. I was trying to puree them for his first meal and got my wooden spoon too close to the blender’s blades.

Dom caught me off guard with his extraordinary needs and illness driven first year. He put a wobble in my world that I had never felt before. His first Christmas came in the midst of it all. In all those holiday photos my husband and I wear dark blue circles under our eyes. In one photo Dom is screaming in my arms. Jason is turning towards me and looking terrified. I remember that moment clearly because Jason asked softly when Dom would be leaving, going home.

Dom’s awkward growing that no baby or child care book had mapped out came into my world like a hurricane and disoriented me. It blew the “Mom” inside me far, far away. I watched it go out the window those nights he cried without stopping. I watched it gust and tumble that string of months where he would stay with no one but me. I watched it crest the horizon and almost disappear the night Dom at three had trouble sleeping because he saw dead men on his bedroom floor.

“How did they get in the window?” he’d say as I opened my blanket on the floor next to his bed where he could see me. He would lie in bed and hang his head over the bed’s edge to stare at me until his eyelids just gave up and closed. I barely felt “Mom” those nights sleeping on the floor like a dog. Nights I went to bed sobbing about the life I’d left behind—my sewing and writing. I pushed the needles and pens out of my life; let them fly into the wind. “For now,” I breathed hopefully, but felt like I’d thrown my lifeline away. Giving up for now was right, I’d remind myself day after day, month after month. I didn’t dream it would be years later before I saw proof at Martin’s Farm when Dom just stepped away from me worriless and chased a pig with Tory. He ran all around the barnyard and then behind the main house where he couldn’t see me. I felt it then. The rope beneath my feet. Solid. Unwavering. My heart opened and dropped a smooth dark chestnut out of its borders which I’d let get thick and thorny through those tough years.

Sometimes it’s just time they need, I realized at that moment. The arrow straight path that a book maps is to keep parents happy. What this kid needed was not a perfect balance of give and take, but an open flow of time, wind across a field, directionless, unbroken.

* * *

In the middle of these ropes is a tire. It marks halfway and let’s me hold sway before I go out on the single rope on my belly to the end. I have made it here exhausted and panting. My confidence left behind like the focus items I brought to Jason’s birth: the photos, music and lollipops. Somewhere into my tenth drug induced hour of labor, I told my husband to take it home. “I can’t leave you,” he said. “Put them out in the hall,” I said unable to look at all that certainty when what I felt was so uncertain. When what I needed was the gift of open time to distract me from some perfect endpoint or the hope of a predictable ride.

* * *

Venturing out on the final rope I feel elephantine. I’m weighed down by the extra pounds that stay on my body despite my attempts at winning back a figure I left behind while I cared for everyone else but me. Those years my body cried out to me “Mother” and my heart, distracted by the needs of my sons, husband and aging parents of my own, didn’t answer.

My boys are intent on helping me now because I’m struggling and I realize now, at this moment in my life and theirs, it’s time that I said “Yes.” I feel hopeful until they move beside me and under me.

“Get out of there! If I fall on you I could kill you!” I say, motherly.

“We can catch you,” they say, their arms woven into something they know is softer than the pine needled earth. I stop my carping and just let them help me because they can and because I need them. I inch out further into more open area. The safety of the tire too far behind me, the tree ahead useless at this distance.

I am definitely stuck on the rope and tell my boys I can’t move, that they need to help me down. One pushes and one catches and we all end up in a heap on the bed of pine needles, the open sky a river of blue above.

* * *

As my boys and I change and grow I need to move forward in my mothering, too. To do that right I need to stop a moment and honor my time as a mother up until now. Honor it all: the things I did wrong; the things I did right; the confidence that came with time, open time that was like blank paper from the start. I filled it in with deliberate strokes the very best I could. Life bumped my elbow along the way and sent long dark lines across it all and, as life will, never allowed me to erase but color over and over and over again making it my very own map and journal. It’s all there and always will be for me to interpret and reinterpret when I need to change my mothering some. I’ll use it now to re-sculpt my “Mom” actively the way my boys’ bodies do in secret so that the next time the mother in me tries on her clothes they will be too small, cartoonish, and I will laugh and I will cry and then I’ll howl like a lonely dog. I’ll move forward no more the expert today than I was yesterday, but always the student. That’s the only truth I’ll carry.