It's raining. Oh shit, it’s raining.

The kids painted croquet set is outside. I should go get it, but it’s dark and I'm tired and don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to do what I should. I feel the panic of one moment at Emily's birthday party today when we sang “Happy Birthday.”

I was fine during the party until we sang and blew out candles. Just for a moment, my voice cracked and I looked at her. She was smiling, unsure of what we were doing looking at the little bits of fire. My body felt like it was melting into the floor, that pit of terror peeking open, remembering how close we were to not having this happen.

And a rush of wanting to hide filled me like stepping on glass. I didn't want to turn and see all those kind people who love us and held us together when she was fighting for her life. I wanted to get away from the permanence of her heart condition. I wanted to be alone and scream. This wanting to hide from a painful truth is a silent part of most days. We moms are good at getting support, letting friends hold us, dealing by bonding.

But I have a darker side in it, too. A childish, rageful side of deep loneliness where I stand on a different side of the river from my friends with healthy kids.

It’s a room without a door in and very little light, no perspective or even compassion. Some of me is unhealed, tied to old places of mute aloneness and uncertain of the value of really agreeing to love another person.

In the black chill of this rainy night, after a raucous, bright party full of delightful people, I choose not to go rescue kids toys from the storm, not to seek comfort for myself, not to talk to my sweet, sweet husband.

I am not the grown up who needs to be here to raise my child in the uncertainty in which we'll reside. I'm not that kind of mother. Is this one of the secret truths of motherhood? Even what we can't do, we do anyway. My heart lives outside of me, tied to little beings who can't promise they will live to adulthood. And I have to stay, dragging the ugly parts of myself along.

By Avvy Mar

Labels: Avvy Mar, birthday party, compassion, Happy Birthday, raining, storm, supportive mother

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“Its going to be so funny when everyone notices how long my hair has gotten!” chuckled my four-year-old daughter, looking at herself in her mirror, basking in self-love.

Preparing for another birthday party, negotiating wardrobe, how much of my make-up I’ll let her wear, we arrived at my daughter’s certainty about what the true focus of the party would be.

“Dominic’s mom, Karson’s mom,” she went on “they will ALL be so amazed by my hair!”

I stared at her, my little center of the universe. I almost reminded her that people will be thinking other things also, but stopped myself. We have hopped off the developmental ski lift and reached the highest summit of narcissism at just the right time. It changes on its own if all goes well. Leave her alone, I tell myself, the world will be knocking her off it soon and often.

What is the good mother response? Join her in it? Say nothing? Move to another topic? “They'll be happy to see you. We haven’t seen them since last year,” I say, attempting to go with it. She is fluffing her hair and gazing in the mirror. “Um, hm. . .” she says.

I wonder about myself at her age and my anxiety over her confident self-celebration. My mother was in the trenches of her long depression, spreading despair throughout the house when I was small. I can remember feeling exuberant and confident. I tried to share it with her.

“It will be OK, Mom,” I remember saying to her on one occasion when I was about my daughter’s age.

Her eyes looked huge and black. “No, it will never be OK,” she said and I felt myself fall into those black pools and believed her fully.

Today, looking at my daughter now touching up her Cinderella lip gloss, I feel my grateful moment for the day.

This is that paycheck that I get as a mother, knowing I’ve cut the cord to that particular maternal inheritance of short-circuited confidence and negativism that I know my mother and her mother received. My daughter’s sun will not be clouded over to the best of my ability.

We go to the birthday party and several moms who haven’t seen us in a while all say the same thing to my child: “Maya, I can’t believe how long your hair has gotten!”

I’m going to put a bonus in their next paycheck.

By Avvy Mar

Labels: Avvy Mar, birthday party, long-haired daughter, make-up, narcissism

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