The sucess in failing.

It's difficult to write about motherhood when slapping frantically through a tidal wave of uncertainty.  It cycles from time to time.  A once confident mother stops running long enough for the blurred peripheral to come into focus and realize another life is happening around her while she has been hectic with the driving and cleaning and shopping and cooking.  I buck against the concept of "mommy guilt," but at times....a mood, an action, a comparison to another mother can wash insecurity over any fortress.

Some parents are deeply committed to providing the best life for their children, come what may.  I would like to think myself one of these.  To nourish a fetus, to bring baby to breast, to crawl aside the infant rocking and teetering on hands and knees, to release the pinky-hold of a toddler to toddle on their own.   I've sat deep in the sofa sounding words to my children waiting for the brilliant moment:  to learn that letters  become a word, a sentence, a story, an adventure....until, one day, they are able to scratch out the most true and tender any story could be: "I love mom."  "I love dad." 

I've held them fevered.  I've rushed to the hospital.  I've pulled teeth dangling by a thread.  I've cleaned gravel from a flap of skin...gross, I know...  I've run alongside bicycles, stripped of training wheels, wobbling down the street.  I've cleaned sheets and underwear that should have been thrown away, and some I have thrown away.  I have been paged to report for duty at every hour of the night, including the research of countless ailments online by the glow of a laptop in an otherwise dark house, including standing in the shower desperate to help my baby breathe with croup, including the pee the puke and the nightmares.

I have sat with a child, tears rolling fat and heavy from the frustrations of homework, still urging them to resist failing themselves.  I've reassured them of the purity of their beauty, the charm and dazzling wits and incomparable spirit I see, even when others speak harshly or leave them forgotten.   I've been an audience to their every performance, clapping excessively... embarrassingly...  

I'm always on the hunt for new adventure, another experience to taste and savor for the first time together.  To me, THAT is the glory of parenting a child: to witness life unfolding and to have the privilege of having a stake in it, to guide or direct it to something whole and good.  A human life taking breath and shape, the luminous awareness of all that is art and the music of language, the germination of thought---to behold the inception of logic and paradox and irony.  Intelligence, sparkling with imagination and discovery and desire, eventually driving the child, the person, to inherit character and will.  And, they stand, with a name you gave them, a name to identify a somebody who carries some of your DNA, some of your good, some of your bad...someone unlike anybody else.  Someone you love unlike anybody else.
It is a miracle.  It is a privilege.

With all this talk of everything "I've" done, it hasn't been alone, and I haven't done anything that any other mother doesn't.  Funny, though, how it's still feels like it's never enough.  Sometimes I lie awake, plagued with a gnawing sense that I fall short.  Like a wall of clouds creeping from the horizon, a front closing in with rain and storm, my shortcomings hit me fast and hard.  I don't want to deny the room I have for improvement.  I may want to deny how large that room feels sometimes.

I suppose reevaluation is like Spring, a rebirth of life gone dormant.  And, like Spring, it gets muddy and messy and violent, sometimes.  Warm air, breathing life into fragile growth, moves in to clear out the cold....and...growth is needed, if I want to continue to take shape and still realize all that can still be new and inspiring, perpetuating what my parents witnessed budding in me so many years ago.

If I didn't feel that I was failing sometimes, then I truly would fail.  The most devastating mistakes I could make would be to resist change and resent failings.  It is a reality, as a mother, that I should never deny because it is the lives of my children at stake, and not just the living, breathing part...but the feeling, believing and daring parts that become all their goals and dreams, their possibilities, and their very ability to inspire their own children to come.