The Tally

I count the minutes to bedtime. Two hours left while helping with homework, one hour left while making dinner, thirty minutes left while answering the same question for the fourth time. I count them not because I don't love my child but because I am tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix, and bedtime is the finish line when the day stops asking things of me.

And then she goes to sleep, and something shifts. The house gets quiet. It should feel like relief but instead it feels like something is missing. I walk past the door. I peek in. I stand there longer than I should, watching her breathe. This little person who I was desperate to hand off forty minutes ago, and now I feel the ache of missing her when she is right in front of me.

I want her and need space from her at the same time, in the same body, sometimes in the same moment. I plan the craft and then long for silence in the middle of it. I cheer for the drawing with my whole heart and count down to when I can sit in a quiet room alone. Both of those things are completely true simultaneously, and the guilt of holding both is often heavier than either one.

I snap sometimes. I hear my voice come out wrong and I watch the reaction and I think: that is not who I am trying to be. And then later, after she's asleep, I tally the day. The sighs. The moments I was elsewhere in my head while she was talking to me. The time I said "in a minute" and meant it but it turned into longer. The guilt takes up more space than the grace.

What I have had to learn, slowly and against my instinct, is that the tally is not the right measure.

The measure is in the peeking.

The longing for space is not a failure of love. It is what love looks like when it is being carried by a person who is also a person, who has a body that gets tired, a mind that needs quiet, a self that existed before the child and still needs tending to.

I don't think she'll remember the snapping. I think she will remember what it felt like to grow up in this house. The crafts and the cheering and the sorry I said as I was coming back to center. She is not keeping the tally. She is keeping memories.

I often ask myself, am I a good mother? I have learned to distrust the clean answer. The clean answer is for people who aren't asking the question.

The asking is the win. The reaching for something better is the measure. The willingness to feel bad about the snapping, apologize, and try again tomorrow is the tally.

The quick steps of a well-rested child will find me in the morning and he count starts over.

XOXO