I Am a Good Enough Mother

I am Messy Hair

My daughters’ and my hair on some days when I can’t find the right brush.  The one with a cartoon picture of Belle and her pink rose on the back. It is the only brush my girls will use without a series of sobs escaping tiny mouths. Some days the three of us remain as such for the day, tangles and kinks from sleeping heavily on our backs. I am grateful for those cowlicks. It means we slept well.

I am a good enough mother.

I am Clutter

I am a cluttered mind and cluttered home.

Toys spewed across the floor.

Legos and dolls.

Puzzles and markers

And then my daughters want to put up the tent—the big one, with the purple pom-poms on top—and I just don’t know where it will fit. Quickly, I shove everything with my foot into different piles on the rug and tell myself that this time I will make them clean up their own mess. As soon as I say this, my daughters have already gotten out all of their stuffed animals to put inside the tent that has yet to be built. So I build it; like I build my home. Piece by piece.

Laughter stuffed inside.

Seeping out of the edges.

I ignore the dust collecting in corners, beneath furniture, the crumbs littering the kitchen floor, the ones that even the dog doesn’t want. I will clean later, I think. Always later.

I am a good enough mother.

I am Decisions

I am saturated from the countless decisions I have to make while in the tight grips of a global pandemic. Brows furrowed…

I am torn between whether or not to send my daughters to school.

To keep them at home.

To play with a friend whom we haven’t seen in months.

Yes we will play outside and yes we will wear masks, but no sweetie we can’t have sleepovers just yet. I take risks with their lives. I drive them around the city in the car, playing the same CD over and over with songs like “Slippery Fish” and “Baby Beluga” and “Let It Go” etched into our minds. In the middle of the night, I debate whether or not to allow them to see their grandma if they are back in school. She is older and has autoimmune diseases and at what point do I live life for the moment or wrap my family up in a protective bubble, scared, alone, but healthy and safe? I am questions unanswered, decisions made without ever going back.

I am a good enough mother.

I am Exhaustion

My body is no longer my own, my time no longer mine to mold. I am sat on and held by bony arms. My body becomes softer and squishier from being pushed.

Pricked

Poked by small fingers out of love.

I start my own projects—perhaps today is the day I will write—but I am stopped by the arguments of sisters, the yells and the screams, the cries and the sorrys. I am awake in the mornings before I want to be. A tiny figure creeps into my bed and curves her body around mine and I snuggle in close, hoping she will go back to sleep. Hoping that we can both go back to sleep, but she never does. As I never do.

I am awake at midnight if they become sick.

I am Band-Aids ready for a fall.

I am always on, always wondering, always preparing, always thinking ahead.

I am a good enough mother.

I am Love

I am endless amounts of it. Boundless. It leaks out of me and sometimes I am scared of it, as if my heart can’t take the amount of love it has to give and so I slide it all back inside.

Build barriers.

Walls.

Structures taught with nails and sharp edges but then I hold onto the warm little bodies of my daughters and it all crumbles again.

In this way, I am broken daily. Gratefully, I am forever changed. I am the one person they want when life becomes too much for them to handle. When they break down in sobs and then the angry tears slide down pink cheeks, leaving the stains of their young worries and fears that I won’t be able to erase, no matter how hard I try. I am the only one they call mother.

And I am good enough.