It Starts to Feel Like Something Big

I measure the grounds, three heaping scoopfuls because I drink my coffee like gasoline, and I get the mug ready. It looks more like a soup bowl than a coffee cup but there is much to be done today, pages-long lists of writing deadlines, emails to send, assignments to complete, calls to make.

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

Writing a book or two, going to college, giving speeches and having a blog and writing deadlines and things filling up a calendar. It’s a dream come true, after all.

I ponder the bigness of it a minute, feeling all of my 33 years for a change, like my words are taken seriously, like my foolish prose might amount to something that buds from my heart someday, something worth these eye-strained hours but just the sheer love of it.

So I pour it dark and sweet and breathe it in, and think much of me with my bowl full of coffee and my little words today. I am glad I have persisted with my tiny big thoughts, glad I have kept click-clacking the keys with contemplation and questions, challenges to those with bigger brains and bigger titles than me.

I think, today, I will have my coffee hot and strong and I will nibble the end of my glasses while I think. I will drink from my bowl over an email to my publisher and feel right distinguished with myself, for a moment.

But the thought is fleeting. 

Five plump fingers rest upon the flesh of my back thigh, just beneath the pink ruffled robe he likes to be wrapped up inside. I did not hear him coming.

“Mommy,” he cracks in his sleep-stuck voice, pulling at the robe ruffles. “I don’t want breakfast yet.”

(I hadn’t offered.)

“Mommy, I just want to snuggle.”

He rubs his eyes and drags his gray blanket across the floor, across dinner crumbs and the shabby teal rug that was new only weeks ago but already looks destined for the garbage. Twelve trampling feet will do that to a carpet. 

They will do it to a mother too, from time to time.

And even though I feel it now, the strain of this body premature for my years, it stings and groans for the hours I have not sat, the years I have not rested.

Bowl-mug in hand, we head to the couch and his head finds my belly, pushing gently into the body gone soft under the laps of three babies, tempered by the gnawing worry over all those not-born babies too, the one whose face I never got to see or kiss and all the ones who wore size 11 Nikes and called me mom just for a season. I am trampled shaggy and soft, body and heart, by those pink baby feet and those smelly boy feet, and those patent-leather-heeled feet. I have gone shaggier than the teal rug in my kitchen. 

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

Like all the mothering and loving and gnawing with worry amounts to more than all the words I could collect in a lifetime.

No title is bigger than mother, I think. None which I am after, anyhow.

So I settle into stale sleep breath and blonde bedhead and savor coffee and feel rightly distinguished, here, in this. 

Not for words, not for notice, not for anything but the elevated place of being the carpet below these precious toes, of a down-pillow belly holding up this sweaty head with its drooping blonde Mohawk.

I ponder the bigness of it, and smile.

It starts to feel like something big, some days.

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