Motherhood: Part Two
On passing the baton
I heard the baby before I saw them. The distress held in those wails, bouncing off the brick walls of the walkway. It’s a heart-wrenching sound, and brings forth a full body response, something primal wells up from the womb, a need to move towards the distress to see how you might be able to help.
As I get closer, I see the mother glance up, not yet ready to make eye contact. I slow down. She pops a dummy into the mouth of her little one, who is clinging onto her for fear of being put down. Left. Then I ask the question, the one that can undo us, in those moments:
“Are you ok…?”
…
…
“It’s her second day”.
And with that, no further explanation is needed. Those howls were from a child reunited with her mother after a long day at nursery. Full of indignation, fear, relief, joy, anger, all rolled up and compressed into that small little body.
I know now, what I must say…
“It gets easier…”
…
…
It’s what we all must say, even though it doesn’t really get easier, it just changes, morphs, dials down, amps up, but never really getting easier. More balanced perhaps. With different ways of coping.
“Does it really?”, she asks.
“Yes”, I say.
With my daughter’s last day at this nursery this week, I tell her how confident the experience has made her, how much she has learned, how much she has loved it, because this bit is all true. I tell her that her daughter will have this too.
I tell her all the things I was told when another mother saw me sobbing one day after a particularly traumatic drop off, when my daughter had hurled herself at the door so I couldn’t escape, screaming, “don’t leave me mummy”.
I would have hugged this mother too, had she needed it, as someone had once hugged me. Instead, we share this fleeting moment. I pass her the baton, one which she will pass on to another, when the time comes.
❤️