I, here.
What I learnt at the wake of motherhood.
She sleeps with a clenched fist, angrily set against her cheek on the blue pillowcase, her head close to the bedroom wall, the pillow more for her back, really. And then she turns over to my side, throws her arms around my head, all angry, frolicking motions, and presses her forehead against mine, clammy, hot and sweet, her breath falls in little rasps against my nose. Warm.
She now talks in the language of whys and whats and what-ifs. No writer should have to forego the existential crisis of NOT having to be asked why the moon follows you everywhere on a random Sunday evening. She will press on until there’s an answer. All my academic research and ardent hours of rigorous training at several academic institutions go down the drain when I promise her, “Mama does not know the answer to that question, mama will read and find out”. She forgives. She lets her acceptance of your apologies fold you in two and puts you away in the back pocket of her denim dress as she marches on to find why fishies sleep with their eyes open.
My house is a clockwork dollhouse of sorts. Wake up, read, breakfast and repeat. For months now we’ve got the rhythm intact. In a house stormed by chaos and an absentee father, only order will restore a sense of peace. So I have curated bits and pieces for the house in a calculated order. Brown edged paper pictures of my girl as a baby, swaddled in mottled picture sheet pasted across the walls. Dried flowers from the failed marriage painted in whites and dried. Lifeless. She sleeps in the crook of my elbow as I arrange one foot long string of lights over all dead objects of our house. Most of this house, I’ve done this way, with a sleeping baby over my shoulder or arm. Once I tried climbing over to the loft and lost footing when the chair slid over the marble floor and broke into two.
I sometimes bathe when she’s still asleep. On other days, I have to bathe only when she will bathe with me. Of late, she will cup a palmful of water and rub it over my body saying, “I wash, mama”. She exorcises a lots of demons from this body she did not cause to bring in, in the first place. She is a force of nature. I tremble at the altar of innocence when I think of ways in which I have wronged this baby by not walking out sooner from a marriage in which I was always tiptoeing over shards of broken glass and bleeding over a just assembled cradle.
She has begun to sing like a bird. She gets that from the prodigal father. She reads like there’s no tomorrow and weaves one story atop another like a precarious set of Jenga blocks: she gets that from me. If you ask someone, “where are you?”, she will walk to you on tip toes and announce, “I, here”, all the while pointing her pudgy index to her little chest and for a few divine moments, you will forget to breathe. I tell you, she is a force of nature.
If I wondered previously if there was a reason to all this pain I’d underwent, I’d have told you I’d have snapped without figuring it all out. I’ve always been that way: needing answers to feel safe. But right this moment, I know I do not have to have all the answers. Through all this storm, the tiny nose of a 12kg someone breathing into my face at nights did not suddenly give me that epiphany alone. There is a God above and he sees all things, I’m told. And maybe one day when he does the final role call, he will ask, “Child, where are you?” and I will say, “God, I, here” and he will laugh and laugh and laugh and that will be enough.