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.
---
Linking up at Emily's place. Join us?
