Loupe

Sometimes I say out loud to no one, “I am so tired.”

Sometimes I stop in the supermarket aisle, and press my hand hard to my heart, to blunt the ache.

My mother often sighed, out of nowhere, long and loud. I don’t think she meant to. I know the feeling of breath, of words, escaping your lips, like air from an untied balloon. She and I: untied balloons.

In my house, a closed-door is an open door. All the doors are always open. Try to lock a door, and that’s exactly when an emergency breaks out, even if the emergency is a scratch so small you’d need a jeweler’s loupe to see it.

The word “loupe” reminds me of wolves. My children are wolves, absent the ability to sustain a minor flesh wound without whimpering. They have sharp teeth.

“Look!” my six-year-old cries, coming into my room with a huge grin. “My teeth are tiny!” They are, and she is such a sweet fanged creature.

Today the yard is an ice rink. My middle daughter, slight eight-year-old that she is, takes the recycling out and starts sliding. She catches herself at the edge of the wooded slope down into the ravine, and shrieks for me. A world of glass spans the distance between us.

“I’m coming!” I call, grabbing the bamboo pole the kids use for digging and for poking one another. Jabbing as I step, I try to fracture the ice, to no avail. I’m down on my ass now, scraped hands stinging. Slowly I edge over to where the hellebores drowse, their long leaves bowing in the cold. Stepping on their heads, their lovely bodies, I make my way down the hill, until the pole extends just far enough to reach my girl, who grabs it and hauls herself to me. Inch by inch, we clamber back to the house.

Not long after, an ache blooms in my finger. It has no bruise or swelling, but the pain refuses to budge. I sit with it, as it gnaws.

Sometimes, when a child cries in my house, I wait a heartbeat to hear the tone. What is this? Grief grabbing with its twisted fingers? Or only a momentary hiccup of the heart? They’ll get a hug either way, but I’m not racing towards small hurts. What is motherhood anyway, if not preparing others for your own inevitable death?

There are nights I write in the dark, the sound of little breathing in the room. A podcast is playing, children’s story, and my poetry, already chipped and imperfect, must fight its way through the flying cars and dazzling candies to reach the page. It ain’t easy. What does adult love, sparking the heart, have on the gravity-busting joy of a child’s fantasies of candy? Not much, it turns out. Not much. (Even, oh my electric cells, this love, love of my life.)

So here I am, medieval-tortured. All the grime and burdening weight of raising wolves pulling me down, while the nuclear lift of loving my children, and a whole lot more love besides, pins my wrists, my helpless hands, to the heavens. Ask me how I stay so flexible, and my tendons will answer, stretched tight as a soldier’s bedsheets. Cherishing, my body sighs. Exquisite cherishing. I grab two fistfuls of sky, and hang on.

Photo by Caroline Hernandez on Unsplash