M Day 2009
I know there are lots of meditations on motherhood popping up on your screen today, but of all I've read this one is my favorite. After a brutal week of suffering one blow after another at the hand of the NYC Department of Education, I am feeling the pain of caring so much.
On the third day, I had a terrible realisation. Looking at my child, so tiny in his translucent cradle, safe only within the containment of my gaze, I realised that this would never end. Even when he had (unimaginably) grown and left home.
I understood at last that I would never be free from this immense, uncompromising love; that my chest had been cracked open down the breastbone, as if with a cleaver; and that from now on my heart would be naked; that every pain my child felt would be amplified in me; and, worse, that I, in the selfish, thoughtless act of creating him, was complicit in this pain, from which neither of us would ever be free.
in birth | parenting
