All the Bits

On writing, breathing, painting, and singing.

Child-me fantasized about motherhood. She loved staying home, sprawled out on the floor, writing Christmas plays, designing sets, and sewing costumes, and she imagined motherhood as a way to spend days tending to a quiet oasis of her own making.

Even teenage-me wanted to fast-forward to a future where I had a cottage. A rocking chair. Framed photographs and artwork. Baskets of wood blocks and legos. Little feet standing on step-stools. I longed for the beauty and comfort I saw in domesticity.

I also savored my exploration of the rich rainforests of my interior world, swinging and leaping and following the whims of ideas. This fierce creative power does not like confinement.

***

Recently, my three-year-old called to me from her seat on the toilet. I opened the door to our small powder room. The white porcelain pedestal sink was once again streaked with gray-black pigment from watercolor paint because my daughters dump and refill glass jars of paint water at this sink. I looked down into Noa’s eyes.

“I need you,” she said, her little feet dangling, “I want com-pa-neee.”

She eyed the open door, “AND I want pri-ba-cee. Come in. Close the door.”

I crouched down beside her, my hands on her knees, trying to give her both the company and the privacy she desired. Outside the door, my six-year-old called.

“I’ll be right there, Soph. I’m just in the bathroom with Noa for a little bit.”

Noa’s eyes widened and her eyebrows lifted. Her forehead scrunched, “No. No, not for a little bit. All the bits. I want you for alllllll the bits.”

I nearly laughed. My hands cupped her cheeks and my nose brushed hers.

The demands of parenting small children do not end. Requests renew moment-to-moment. Their hunger for the bits, all the bits, is insatiable.

***

In our ongoing game of Mary and Kathy, my sister Caroline and I pretended to be best friends raising kids together. We cannot remember who was Mary and who was Kathy, which may be telling. The identities of these characters were somewhat merged and interchangeable. We talked about naps, park playdates, sunscreen, and baths. We were mothers. And there was something in this prototype that I desired deeply. Some part of being relentlessly depended upon felt attractive to me. Maybe I saw a satisfying combination of purpose and authority amidst what I perceived as quiet days? I’ve always wanted quiet days.

It turns out, days with small children are rarely quiet. And it turns out, without time for myself, I become a withered balloon—hovering above the floor, trapped low in the corner, without the buoyancy to move. Two babies, a global pandemic, no childcare, and a partner whose work travel resumed helped me understand that it is unhealthy for me to give all the bits of myself.

To be myself, I need regular access to my internal world. And to travel into this world, I need space. Space—to stretch and dance and ponder and create—is what I most crave.

I tell myself it is good for my children to see me pursuing work I love, that ultimately this is what I hope for them, too: to find passions that ignite them. Mostly, though, I do not want to be deflated. I do not want to be a deflated mother. I do not want to be a deflated human. I want to bob and lift and float.

***

Last month, I spent a week at a writing retreat led by Megan Stielstra and Eiren Caffall¹. The retreat site, Ragdale, was a five minute drive from my house, about an hour north of Chicago, on the property of an estate that now offers artist residencies.

Each morning, after a quiet walk through the prairie, we sat down for breakfast and coffee and then enjoyed a couple hours of instruction. After lunch, the days were open, ours. I sat at my laptop in a room made of windows, like a greenhouse. 

At dinner, early evening sunlight filtered through the wavy, west-facing bay windows. Then we sat in the living room on couches, an assortment of armchairs, the floor for the day’s final discussion. The setting sun flooded our eyes with golden light.

My familiar circuit of traffic lights, school drop-off and pick-up, Target runs, and pediatrician appointments was so very close. I felt far, far away.

I wrote. And wrote and wrote.

***

Midweek, I went home for the night. Only a sliver of the moon was visible against the night sky. Cicadas rang, loud and true. With a click of a button, the garage door lifted, and I reentered the realm of logistics and schedules. Marc was traveling the next day, leaving the house at 6am. The plan was for me to spend the night at home and take the kids to school. My parents would then pick them up.

I settled into our bed. At dawn, over the sound of Marc’s shower, I heard the creak of our bedroom door and the thump of small feet. Soon, I felt Noa’s presence and breath, bedside.

“Hi, sweet girl. Mama’s home.”

I lifted her under her armpits and situated her under the covers with me. Her body settled directly on top of mine: her head, heavy at the base of my throat, her cheek pressing into my chest, her belly warming my ribs, her legs streaming down my thighs. My arm wrapped around her waist, and my hand rubbed her back. I smelled her hair. I let her weight imprint on me. All the bits.

Eventually, breakfast and the day beckoned. My hand reached for the switch on the neck of the swing-arm lamp. We sat up.

I looked into Noa’s, now illuminated, face and saw, clear before me: pink eye.

Sick-call ran from 8:00 - 9:00 am. School drop-off was at 9:00 am. My first session of the day began at 9:30 am.

I packed everything up, called Mom, woke Soph, fed the kids breakfast, gobbled some eggs, buckled the kids in the car, loaded their overnight bags, drove into the parking lot at the very start of sick-call, received Noa’s diagnosis of an ear infection and conjunctivitis, dropped Noa with my Mom, asked Dad to pick-up the antibiotics and eye drops, dropped Sophie at school, and walked in the door at Ragdale. 

That afternoon, I sat on a paprika colored sofa reading Where the Sky Began, a book about the prairie’s vast expanse. These grasslands once covered nearly the entire area that is now Illinois. We are The Prairie State. Yet, almost all prairies were converted for agriculture or human habitation, making native prairies among the rarest ecosystems in North America.

We were staying beside one of Illinois’ few remnant prairies. My heart felt at home on this open plane. I lengthened and widened. My thoughts, usually spooled around the tight structure of the day, now looped and trailed, long threads flying in the breeze.

I breathed. And breathed and breathed.

***

On the final day, I pulled into my driveway and decided to leave everything, every single thing, in the car. I approached my front door, hands open and free.

Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong ding-dong went my wild ringing of the doorbell. With squeals, my children thrust open the front door. Our eyes clicked. Our bodies flung together. We held each other and laughed.

This is my ideal homecoming: a bell that rings for instant hugs, unencumbered by, “hold on,” or “let me just,” the negotiation of bodies trying to fit around baggage.

Later, Sophie set herself up to paint. She swirled brush bristles in watercolors. She painted, rinsed, and painted again. She kept groaning and saying the noise Noa and I were making in the kitchen was interrupting her concentration.

Instead of dismissing her complaint or leaving her to deal with her frustration, I suggested we move her desk into the sunroom, where there are two doors. Sophie’s eyes brightened and her nod was quick in its repetition. Yes. Yes. She wanted to move the desk into the sunroom.

I rearranged a basket of crocheted blankets and the armchair that was my Gramzi’s to fit the desk beside the window. Immediately, the desk felt happy, like a potted plant in just the right light. 

Sophie sat down. I asked if this was quiet enough. She said it was.

Then she added, her head and gaze tilted up to meet mine, “Are you jealous, Mom?”

I laughed and admitted I kind of was, feeling the delight of us sharing a specific preference, like this kid, whom everyone has always said is a clone of her father, is made of me, too.

She painted. And painted and painted.

***

Later, Noa joined Sophie. I stepped outside to water the begonias in the window box and stood back, watching them. I snuck inside to grab my camera.

Sophie came out and handed me her painting. “It was raining,” she said, “so there was a rainbow after and there are white specs because it’s snowing too.”

My breath caught. Years of previous moments unfurled in my heart: moments of childhood longings, deflated balloon moments, moments wrestling to better understand myself, and many negotiations of wants and needs and budgets to prioritize time and space for myself and my art.

“You can have it, Mom. It’s for you!”

I wanted to communicate how much this painting—this moment, the moments wrapped up inside this moment—meant to me. Here I am, a mother, with space to make my art. Here is my child, making art, offering it to me.

“Thank you, Sophie,” I said. “Thank you for making this for me.”

She headed back towards the house. I returned to the flowers. Looking back over her shoulder—her hand on the door handle and one foot up on the step of the door’s threshold—she added, “That is also an invitation to join us.”

Her eyebrows shot up, as if she were stating something obvious. I memorized her words. An invitation to join us.

Soon, we crowded together around the desk, painting. Sophie sat on the metal desk chair. Noa sat atop a toddler-sized piano. I sat on the red stool.

This. A home where quiet beauty blooms into art. Is what I’ve always wanted.

Bit by bit, I painted a prairie and a child swinging on a tree swing.

Outside, the cicadas rang, a droning that expands into a crescendo, contracts and fades slightly, and repeats, without break. They’ve been waiting seventeen years to sing this chorus.

They sing. And sing and sing.

1. Read their work, seek their teaching, practice their kindness.