m., the ineffable intimacy of mother and child, the elemental need for our bodies to be near each other: this is the story of our second year together.
i chose these pictures because they reflect the casual grace of your touch, our at-oneness, your taking for granted the safety of my body.
in these precious moments where i come to realize that your hand is resting comfortably on mine, or your cheek is pressed against my breast, i raise my camera; anxious to capture it before it startles like a bird and flies off. your touch claims me as beloved, and in so doing, brings me into an awareness of myself as one who deeply loves. your touch, my awareness of it, my response, your response back, this endless cycle of love given, received, sent back – all nothing less than a lesson in the divine gaze.
m., the staccato gut punches of these periodic distances from your body – this grim business of shared custody – has assailed my life, married it with grief, making me in turns so many things: wild with my inability to reach you, grateful for the relief of another set of hands, furiously jealous that anyone but me know the little cycles of your ins and outs. i crawl the landscape of the mother without her baby, a lunar place no woman belongs. but then, so very many women live on this moon, some permanently. i peer at this picture again, cell phone screen reflecting against the glass of my space helmet. “i am the woman being touched in these pictures”, i say, over and over again.
i wake up, back on earth. do you feel all jumbled up inside too, my sweet, i ask you from the dark bedroom where i lie awake in my empty bed, sending my shushes and motherly sounds down the valley in hopes that they’ll land in your crib, comfort you, help you to understand. if only the wind could tell you the songs i’ve sent to you when you are gone. but grief is nothing if not a wave that crashes, and then here you are again, seeming none the worse for wear, your closeness a balm, the presence of you a most cherished tide.
did i imagine the moon? surely i’ve never been anything but a harried mother, i think to myself as you tuck yourself into my skirts, underfoot. alone with you and your sister, moving through the moments on the clock, i’m more earth-bound than i can say. the relentless demands of feeding, cleaning, comforting, entertaining, worrying, managing, scheduling, encouraging, disciplining, listening, and responding – alone – these things have some weight to them. i start to be able to predict how much power i need to lift each foot off the ground. i love this gravity. it is heavy, yes. but it keeps me here. with you.
yet the grim business continues, and as i watch your father turn his back to me, laughing with you as he carries you off to the home i thought i’d raise you in, i feel the weight slipping off. it slips so fast. what was a normal step yesterday now is comically powerful, hurtling me forward and head over heels, like the astronauts goofing around on those space station videos. i’m forever living in yesterday’s gravity. it takes no more than the time for him to drive you back to his home for me to be back in the eddying moon dust, wondering if it was in fact earth that was the dream, and not the moon.
and so back to these pictures i go, repeating my mantra into the airless and zippered quiet of this space helmet.
i am the woman being touched in these pictures.
and only a few more days until i get to go home.
Letters to a Life I Loved 