shapeshifter

For the love of all things, give me a job in which I learn something and sell nothing. Especially not myself. Don’t ask me to look at a screen or make a post or convince anyone of anything.

I have never been a mom who longs for time away from her kids. Not really. A couple of hours here and there always had me ready for more of them. Summer camp made no sense and you can forget any talk of something along the lines of boarding school or any other sort of premature exodus. Eid spent three weeks away for three consecutive summers; his absence was made bearable only by the fact that he was still a homeschool kid tiptoeing out of the pandemic and he needed something big.

I have been this way from the beginning. I spent the first four months of Maple’s life sobbing over the fact that she was born, which means she will die. I couldn’t even. It wasn’t remotely on my radar in those early months and years that they would not spend their entire lives pressed up against me, and instead just the better part of eighteen years. It is not enough. It has never been enough.

And yet, here we are, courting prep schools and trying like hell to help our eldest son spend his final high school years on a campus somewhere in New Hampshire or Massachusetts. It has been a difficult process for me to come to my current understanding of why this matters and what it means. I am whole-body opposed to paying for high school, especially when financing college is so clearly on the horizon. But high school (and middle school) in Northern Vermont is rough in a whole bunch of ways; it sucked for moo, and it isn’t much better for bear, especially when you’re a kid who has big ambitions around something hard to access here.

Right now, more than any other season of my life of mothering thus far, I feel myself entirely in the orbit of my children. I am a perpetual shapeshifter, at every turn wearing the skin best suited to whichever child I am tending in the moment. It is more extreme than it has ever been. I do not think it is a bad thing. But I do perceive a wobble within this reality. Like some future version of me may pay the price for this identity recklessness I currently occupy. I worry that once they are all off on their own and do not need me in these big, everyday ways anymore, that I will be only a husk. A hollowed-out shell of something that once housed a meg.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting my friend’s barn while her flock was being shorn in the days leading up to Vermont Sheep and Wool. I love this event so much, for all of the reasons, however, my fall identity in these high school years of Eider’s is lacrosse mom. That is the skin I wear. I was down in Baltimore for a college showcase on the Saturday and Sunday of Sheep and Wool. We drove down and back in under 36 hours with three gorgeous games sandwiched in the middle. Somehow. That is what we did. It feels like utter insanity, and yet I will drop it all and do it again at a moment’s notice. When I wear my Lacrosse Mom costume, you can hardly even tell that it’s handmade. I later found out that my friend won first place for one of her fleeces, and somehow that little touch of connection was enough for me to feel real.

I hope we can remember these times together. One day, when they are so distant and I do things that make more sense. We never know, when we have kids, who we might become for them. And isn’t that just such a radical thing? I mean, I guess not all parents do it this way and who can blame them, but I have always thought that I had them, and therefore, what’s the point if I am not going to do everything I possibly can to help them touch their dreams. Or at the very least, find out if the dream is real.

Chris’ and my life right now is a cardboard structure held up with string around the world we have tried to build for our kids. It is feeble and incomplete and needs a rest and yet we continue to say yes like it is the only word we can get to take shape in our mouths. These past few months have been a tumult. We are unsettled in our current household structure. Chris, in a job that we know is only temporary and yet continues to drag on night after long dark night. The math isn’t quite mathing, not by a long shot, and I am doing what I seem to do best when we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. My version of rubbing pennies together and pretending I’m a magician, which is really just me squeezing one gig after another into a bag that I wish were as deep as Mary Poppins’ bag, but is really just an inverted sock.

It’s sort of working except that I botched the equation and made my hours count for less than they have in twenty years when I went out and got an actual job working for a business other than my own. It is, in fact, extra bad math, and I am still wondering how the hell I can get it to click. Especially now that I have signed up for 3 bedtimes a week away from Freddy, which continues to be my very favorite part of every single day. But I am committed, and here is both why and what.

For the love of all things, give me a job in which I learn something and sell nothing. Especially not myself. Don’t ask me to look at a screen or make a post or craft something designed to convince anyone of anything. If I am to help pay for prep school, then I want a real job that I do in real time in the real world. Preferably in a barn, nestled in a bowl of pasture and forest, with big-bodied bovines all around and armfuls of fresh milk and yogurt and cheese to bring home to my boys.

I’m doing the evening milking and chores at a farm in the North East Kingdom three nights a week, and I am either a horrible imposter or completely embodied in the role best suited to the most eternal parts of myself. It is deep for me to step into manure-covered barn boots and make a ritual of the back half of the day. Repeat and repeat and repeat until complete. Taking care of milkers and their various offspring scattered about the barns. Pushing up their feed or measuring their bottles. Sanitizing units made elegant by their simplicity. Pumps and vacuums and gentle voices. Big milky mamas whose bodies heave under the rhythm of the ritual until they are snug in their sand beds, chewing their cud, resting deeply.

Right now, while I am still learning and the patterns have not yet embedded themselves into my cells, the work is like floating in and out of a dream. Like I have circled all the way back to the flicker of a notion of who I might become before everything became so determined by the revelatory mystery of mothering. Before I learned to wear so many skins so well suited to the whim and desire of my three babies. I found myself along the roads of their childhoods, more than I could have ever imagined, something so deep and true it is almost impossible now to trace it back to a time before it was me by virtue of them. But I lost something too. And I think that might be what is starting to shake loose a bit underneath the thick soil of twenty years spent building a mother. The she that is me was ultimately always born to be both, and now I am beginning to finally close the loop and make the join that brings it all back together again. I am finding the tender care within the caregiver, tending cows.

Ok maybe that is all to say for now. It is a happy-sad time. A hard yet hopeful moment in our lives. Confusing in its chaos, but also perpetually gorgeous and real. In this season of working so hard toward goals and desires and ambitions and the maybe one day I can still get so clear on this moment right now. It’s sweet perfection. It’s everything I have ever wanted-ness. It’s all right right now. This, after all, has always been exactly it.

There is, of course, more to say about my developing understanding of how sending our sweet boy away for his last years of high school might actually be an incredible act of protecting his childhood far more than keeping him home would be. But that is hard to express without revealing too much about things our son would rather keep private. And yet, it is real, all of this that is unfolding. And I am perpetually humbled by everything I never knew I didn’t know. I am learning still. On and on.