Being a mother is always-already near to the wild heart.
The day of his first birthday, S and I play around on the bed like we do every night before starting our sleep time routine. I watch him fastidiously, jumping to hold him if he ends up near the bed edge. This time, while sitting, S gets ahead of himself, pushes his body back and falls backward. Usually, there are two wool rugs against each edge of the bed, but earlier that day they were moved to clean the wood floor.
I rush over to S, sweating. He is sweating too. His cries don't last long, but long enough for my heart to syncopate and check the back of his head over and over again, moving in all directions because I am convinced his head never felt as flat. I google all the symptoms because my friend E went to emergency with her daughter, F, recently because F had fallen off the bed and, both, 811 and the pediatrician told E to go to the hospital. Ten hours later, F was fine injury wise but caught a bad bug and was sick for over a week. Each choice is always a sacrifice with children. I message my mother. She assuages me that babies are built to fall, S's head could not have been flattened and our bed is well low to the ground. She insists he will be ok even if tonight I won't be.
I remember early on thinking that if S was to die it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, after all, he had been alive for a few days/weeks and I didn’t really have an attachment to him yet. I loved my pregnancy and at least I had that. I would revisit this the idea of mourning regularly because taking care of a baby is making sure they stay alive. Their bodies are resilient yet the most vulnerable. As time went on, I would think, ok, I would miss him, it would affect me somewhat. Now, after a whole year of being a pair yoked together, I don't know if I could ever recover if something were to happen to him.
It is in moments of pain or hurt that S becomes real to me. He becomes a human. Maybe because in those moments his mortality comes into question. Of course, the likelihood of him dying from me accidentally scalding his legs during bath time or a gastro virus are nearly zero, but in those moments S's body’s limits are foregrounded and known to me. Most of our days are spent going through the motions of him being a baby. While change on a larger macro level seems swift, it is slow in the everyday—we do the same things, read the same books, eat similar foods and visit the same places.
In moments when the auto-pilot breaks down, when our schedule changes, when S is hurt, when I am hurt, when I am not with him, I am reminded that I have a son, that I am a mother. As deeply as I live it, in the ordinary every day I tend to forget it.
This project is named after one of my favorite novels, Near to The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, a novel that I read while pregnant with S.
Being a mother is always-already near to the wild heart.
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