bonsai spruce

oh my god I think I am learning from my mistakes after all

This morning, like most mornings, Wilfred crept into my bed and wrapped his arms around my neck, his face pressed into mine. He squished his big cloud lips (the ones he got from Chrissy) into mine and whispered I love you I love you I love you in a way that sounds like it lives inside of the tide pulse, or is a little replica of the sea sounds on the shore, just out this screen door, and down off the deck, through the blueberries, and DIY bonsai spruces, beyond the rocks, just there. Just out the door. He calls to me in the mornings, the same way the sea calls to me, to all of us, every day no matter where we sit on the planet. Landlocked or right up on the edge of things. A primordial pull back and back and back to our origin. The very beginning of things. Of me and you and everything that both abides and is changed through the course of time and tides.

This love is so big. Every day the ask is bigger and I am humbled time and time again by my capacity to meet the call with so much desire and inspiration. Growing older is the most sublime experience of all. That my mind’s intuitive desire to expand into presence simply sits here inside the nexus of my consciousness, ripe for the picking. What an absolute wonder of incarnation.

Freddy turns five in a week. FIVE! It feels like such a milestone, this birthday. In part because he is truly growing into a big boy and also because of the mark it traverses in my parental journey and the unfolding revelation of interwoven identities within the woman I continue to become.

Just before Eider turned five, my lived experience was transformed on nearly every level. It marked the end of one version of me and the beginning of another. I crossed a threshold between relating to myself as meg and wife and mom in a way that was more responsive than specific; my world was happening to me and I was uncomfortable with my role within it all. And I stepped into this next part of being in which I am gifted the repeated choice of this life, and in which a simple reorienting of perspective has put gratitude and bounty at the center. There is a line in the sand of my life at that point and it is very clear to me. Before and after. I nearly unraveled my world and lost everything in that crossing. But I did not and for that, there isn’t a day that goes by that my heart does not sing a song of thanks.

And so, it also marks a definitive shift in how I showed up as mom. I was bumbling a little bit before that. Still doing the very best that I knew to do, still practicing presence the best I could, but something busted up inside of me and provided me with infinitely more of all the parental requisites after that time and it simply does no longer compare. More patience, more grace, more forgiveness, more curiosity, more insight, more humility, so much more of me, really. The me that was always meant to be revealed. The me that stretches all the way back and forward through time from the very first steps out of, and into, the seacoast surf.

I have no advice on how to arrive at such a space inside. I arrived here by chance. And the good fortune of choosing, and being chosen, time and time and time again, earth revolution after earth revolution, by a partner interested in seeing what might happen if we love deep and listen hard. Who is always willing to try again. And again. Who I can cast off self-consciousness with and heed the deeper call toward my truest and most tender self. This is my life’s fortune. This incredible lucky chance.

I do not have regrets about the mother I was before. I feel generous and loving to that version of me and how she led me here. She made some very brave choices and they were met with other brave choices and the magic of this perfect chance is never, ever, lost on me. But I do feel tenderness knowing that the version of me that Freddy got from zero to five was much different than the version that Maple and Eider got, and I am leaps and bounds preferential to the me of today. I do think Freddy is so lucky for this much more vast version of his parents. We are wiser (and far older) than we were when we were just beginning to wonder how to be people and parents all at the same time. It is a lament over which my heart composes ballads, laced with a quality of nostalgia that feels most like my parental signature. I love to reflect on time and growth and what lasts as it relates to what dissolves or transmutes.

I do solidly believe in the wise and sturdy and loving parents that all three of our children have today. Maple and Eider have an excellent mom and dad. They always have but thank goodness it is an ascending curve. And if this growing edge signals anything, may it simply be that we will learn and evolve and improve over the whole course of our lives of parenting these three. Our work is far from done which is the inherent beauty of the task. We keep growing into greater ability and increased capacity and to know and love one another within this context and it is the most wonderous luck of my existence. To get to keep on choosing this life. These people. This love. It is everything.

So, yes. Five next week. After nearly 19 years as parents, he has a pretty well-patinaed circle of care. Where, even inside of the hard, all of the inevitable challenge and suffering that life is, it does keep getting better as we keep learning from what works and what doesn’t. As we keep leaning into love in the face of fear and doubt and our soft human fleshiness. Far from fresh but far from finished.