Of Maternity & Mortality
For months I’ve been trying to get myself organized, make everything align so as to have one of those special early morning moments with my dog. When the burnt grass and barren fields feel fresh, revived for just a nanosecond in the greater scheme of the twenty-four-hour day, thanks to a misty dew. Some droplets of which I can feel quenching the cracked skin of my sandaled feet, a small gesture making me feel mighty alive. These are the moments in which I fall into my own pace, a new rhythm with which I am still growing acquainted and yet it feels like…me. Then, now, always. Yesterday, I finally got that moment with the Blues – literally and figuratively speaking. But it didn’t happen in the quiet, unassuming twilight. We walked out of the house and towards Van Gogh’s campo scape just as the hour turned golden. and instead of carrying with me only the calm chaos of a mothering night, I entered this sacred space with the sweat of a whole day still clinging to my back, tidbits of information and conversation stuck in my head like the leftovers crusting up my shirt. Instead of embracing the moment to inhale and turn inward, the need to exhale all that had been brewing in the heat of this last week in one long vent, was all consuming. So, I called for my personal roadside assistant; an expert in helping me cool the motors of my mind.
The whole week had been clammy and indecisive, the humidity oppressive, sending my circulation on an involuntary rollercoaster ride and my thoughts right with it. Thoughts that resembled those freely floating, fluffy white clouds painting the sky one minute, only to puff themselves up into a giant conglomerate of suffocating pressure the next. They moved fast and without a real anchor, though the most striking ones always returned into my line of vision, forcing me to reflect on them, to find the meaning behind their shape. And they were frightening but I felt encouraged to sit with them. Not long enough to take over all the wonderful moments of my present; just enough to accept our reality. How fleeting it really is. Just like those clouds in the sky – never the same, a constant, moving metamorphosis, shapeshifting, taking on one form and morphing into another, a cycle as infinitely finite as are we. I hadn’t realized just how long and pragmatically I’d been sitting on these clouds.
***
The other day, I was in the backseat of the car, next to my daughter – as per usual when we go anywhere that is bound to be more than a half hour drive. It’s just one of those things. Between playing with her, lying to her about the proximity of our destination and calming her when she tries to rip the seatbelt from her little body like the Hulk, it’s another opportunity for me to marvel at this beautiful creature and tell her that she’s the best thing in this whole entire world. Because she is. So, as I was going through exactly that thought process the other day – resting my eyes on that tiny face, watching all those enamoring gestures, awestruck by her unique personality – my brain ditched the mileage of our car to hop on to a speed train of teen memories, young adult regrets and midlife consciousness. As that sweet hand of hers wrapped itself around my index finger like a dose of MDMA around the heart, I turned for a moment to look out onto the motorway, watching the cars zip in and out of lanes, disappear into the tunnel ahead and emerge on the other side, driving off into the sunset. And that’s when it suddenly arose, from somewhere way back in my musical memory, waving at me like an old friend that fit so perfectly, so intensely into that era of my life; one I hadn’t thought of in quite a while.
During a time when I felt the fear of uncertainty stinging clear, it became somewhat of a prayer. I was around fifteen, sixteen in the post-grunge era, and certainly not the only kid to connect to Incubus’s lyrics on a personal level. Of their albums, my favourite will always remain Morning View (2001) but, in terms of meaning and circumstance, Make Yourself (1999) is the one that immediately springs to mind, and it’s all down to one particular song that often kept me going when little else did. Listening to Drive, reading over the lyrics time and again, helped me find my own drive when my soul’s engine was running on empty. And so, I copied them down everywhere, always at a hand’s reach whenever I needed to visualize these words: in my notebook, my diary, and onto my inherited Overseas jeans in black ink and tears.
As I was sat there in the backseat of the car, thinking back to all those moments I chose to hold my own and drive, I felt that familiar bite of shame again. Yes, I had managed to reverse out of a tight spot in my life and back out onto the road and into the light. Yes, it was me who decided to take the wheel and steer. Just not in the literal sense. In reality – as well as in my catastrophic dream world– I am always in the passenger seat. Theory already in the bag, around ten practice lessons under the sweaty beltline, but I never got that paper, and never revisited it either. And now here we are, seventeen years later and I’ve finally found my motivation. Because I want to be that mama. The one that complains about having to play taxi but secretly loves packing up the car and zooming off on an adventure somewhere for the day. Because the minute my lack of hitting the gas pedal privileges comes up, I (am made to) feel less than. This is part of the mid-aged make-yourself initiative, the route towards the quintessential mama-mode, mini-van et all. The thing is…it also serves as yet another reminder of how, once I just kept on trucking on autopilot without ever checking my oils, let alone my brake pads. Now, it is a must. A proud obligation. One that makes me realize just how little I valued real Zen and the art of maintaining my motors and the cycles of my brain.
***
The skyline before me turned into a painter’s pastel palette, light hues of oranges, yellows, pink and purples melting into one another, outlining the tree tops and their crackling branches as I laid it all out to my roadside helpline– these new thought processes and epiphanies. Ironically enough, it was something so trivial that had finally unleashed the storm in my head. A comment made, left with too many lines between which to read. But there it came, firing through the phone lines like shots of lightning, a slur of existential angst and crises swirling through the air, neatly wrapped in a tornado of comic relief, spiraling in pent up, sleep deprived adrenaline like the dust I was kicking up with my feet as I walked and talked and talked and walked until the sun disappeared behind the mountain, the crickets drowned out the sounds of the day and I returned to an urban setting, walking, talking, breathing, beneath street lanterns buzzing as loudly as my mind, unfiltered and urgent.
Insisting on instructing her on what my daughter needs to know “in case of”. Death. Emergency. Anything that could possibly hinder me from showing her, her from knowing, how much I love her. How obsessed I am with her. How I can’t bear to think of missing a single second of her growing up and into the beautiful human being she already is. You tell her all this, make sure she knows. And we laugh and joke about how closely it’s all linked, maternity, mortality – as soon as we bear, we become irrefutably aware of the fact we’re going to die. Some day. But even some day is too soon. I tell her about the image I saw just before I walked out the door and dove deep into this well of contemplation; the crumpled Clio and smashed windshield wedged beneath the back wheels of another car. And what I knew to be behind this image – a mom and her two kids, the youngest not that much older than my daughter. Thankfully, they all got away without a scratch but a shock that is sure to last. Suddenly all comments and pauses, no matter how pregnant, became irrelevant, their former relevance pitiful.
The past year and a half has opened my eyes to the fact that, I’ve spent so much of my life in the passenger seat, and I can’t honestly tell who was piloting at the time. On many occasions, fear took me up to those steep inclines, waiting till nightfall to drop me off the edge from which I’d fall and fall until I awoke panting and paralyzed. Other instances saw a ghost driver behind the steering wheeling – a voice, hushed enough not to reach the logical part of my cerebral cortex yet overbearingly operatic the deeper it snuggled itself into my chest. Convinced it was headed in all the right directions when, really, it was following the signposts in Alice’s Wonderland – this way, that way, down the rabbit hole and back again. Fully accepting the mad hatter’s tea parties for what they were, but too comfortable in the attending guest role to make a strong exit. I cared and worried much more about the lives of others than I did about my own. Now I worry about everyone else’s and my own. Keith Richards no longer serves as an excuse.
***
It’s dark now, an irregular breeze dancing past me every now then. Sometimes it stays long enough for us to waltz through the street on a three-tact breath, a perfect prompt; why I hate the summer daze and love those summer nights. Living room lights dimmed, citronella candles lit on holiday terraces, the loud roars amongst the quiet murmur of people gathered at the restaurant I can see from atop of the hill I am standing on. A crossroads, each road leading to a different muddle of social classes, the inhabitants of each sparkling villa, each crumbling townhouse, each cozy flat living out their respective circumstances, all trapped in the same truth. We’re saying our goodbyes now, souls lifted following dry-eyed tears and heavy laughter, that s-s-s-i-gh erupting from somewhere behind the heart space like an escaped, lonely hiccup on the loose. She knows I’m momentarily freed from the mental load though it will linger physically throughout the rest of the night, perhaps for days to come. Knows it will follow me into my dreams. She knows there’s nothing she, or anyone else, can say that will reassure me, that will convince me of their ability to deliver the message, to love like I do. Because she’s facing the same fears. Maybe not in that particular moment, but they’re always there. Hovering. I can hear her warm smile on the other end of the receiver.
And so, I sail on home, through the sprinkler systems washing away the pains and sorrows trodden into the pavements that day, past the inviting fluidity of the stagnant swimming pool, its water gently lapping against its walled borders, happily contained and content. I enter our home, its walls still burning hot in the afterglow of it all – of the day, of life, fiery wants and desires, embers of love and rage and impatience glistening on the white tiled, marbled floors, drooping from the ceilings like wax from all those candles I’ve left out to pasture in the relentless July sun. Muted only by certainty. Acceptance. We’re here. Today. Now. It’s driven me before only now, I genuinely recognize it for its vague, haunting mass appeal. And I’m finally beginning to find that I, should be the one behind the wheel. Trying to convince myself that, whatever tomorrow brings…She’ll know.