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The gift

“Come here,” I’ll tell June.

Or I’ll ask Harper, “Say that again?”

I see them do something new, maybe something impressive — maybe not — but something that stops me in the moment and makes me go ‘this is so cool,’ and then I’ll either make them repeat it for my camera or my internal mom-ologue will begin chattering immediately, encoding what I’ve just seen, crafting the esssay or the column at the sentence level, with the core of the whole thing being that moment of feeling that’s struck.

Photos. Essays. Columns.

Or a Facebook post.

There are a lot of dialogue sessions dictated onto my timeline.

Because kids — my kids maybe a lot, and maybe not as much as most, I don’t really know — say some funny freaking crap, you guys.

A lot of women talk about how rewarding motherhood is. What a gift it is. How blessed they are by motherhood. Abstract memes with photos of sunsents and puppies and flowers and beaches. And words like “Motherhood challenging or weird or crazy or disappointing, but I wouldn’t give it up for a thousand… whatevers.”

Okay.

But for me, it’s not the motherhood itself that I’m grateful for.

Don’t misunderstand me.

I am grateful for my children. But I’m also grateful for what appears to be an inextricable portion of my personality. I’m grateful that, for whatever reason, I can’t stop writing.

About them.

Writing isn’t just a sedentary, solitary act. Not one single piece of good writing comes without keen, intense, sometimes intuitive observation. Not without involvement. Never, never does any written thing come without engaging with someone or something for which the writer aches.

And the worse that ache, the better the writing.

I’m not talking shin splints of the soul, here, people. I’m talking slow, lingering burns. Gnawing, ravenous hunger

I’ve often told people that, for me, if I’m not writing about what hurts I’m not writing about what matters. And for me, at many points throughout the day, motherhood is painful.

Have you ever heard of the “superbark?” My kids watched Bolt and now they screech like harpies day and night because apparently the powdery mongrel did it.

We are never, underline, ever watching Lilo and Stitch.

I think a lot of people think of motherhood as feeding and wiping and cleaning and singing and rocking and reading and nurturing and all kinds of other -ings that somehow relate to keeping another human being alive until its old enough to fend for itself.

Or at least go to college, and allow you do all your -inging from a distance.

And it is. Motherhood is all of those things.

But for me, more than anything, motherhood has become a chronicle. An extended exercise in archiving.

Does anyone ever think of the mother as witness?

Because they should.

No matter what -ing you’re -inging, at any given moment, you are ultimately witnessing – moment by moment – slivers of time and experience that are fleeting, fragile, peculiar, precious, and profound.

The thing right now is active parenting. Put down the phone. You don’t need a picture of this. You’re oversharing. You’re not in the moment.

All criticisms of parents that appear either too obsessed with their children to stop documenting them or simply inaccessible because of the barrier that naturally constructs itself – the veil that must, if the endeavor is to work at all – separate the photographer, writer, painter, speaker, or even thinker from the thing – the person – as it happens.

And that’s legit.

All things in good measure.

It’s cool.

But I think that documentative parenting can be just as meaningful, and can have just as positive an outcome as attachment parenting or helicopter parenting or iguana parenting or whatever noun-parenting you want to compare it with.

Author’s note – I freaking hate helicopter parenting.

Detest it. It makes my skin crawl.

But I needed a noun and using it here to fill space and make my sentence rhythmicaly complete is pretty much the only thing helicopter parenting is good for so. Anyway.

Back to the show.

I don’t know. Maybe you have to be a creative type of person.

I’m creative.

And I’m not bragging.

Being creative is not synonymous with being popular. Or understood. Or empathized with.

And it’s not easy.

And it’s not even easy not to be it either. You can’t just choose not to be creative if you are. It’s a way the brain is wired. And it makes it really hard to relate to everything.

And everyone.

But for me, documenting our lives – mine and my children – in words and candid photographs of what may seem mundane and banal to others is how I interact. It’s how I process. It’s how I learn and encode and engage. It’s how I get to know my children. It’s how I empathize with them. It’s how I make meaning out of what sometimes feels like complete and abject chaos. I document their growth, and in the process of documenting it I take note of my own, and how the two are bound, causally, and will be.

Forever.

There’s a constancy, an urgency to my compulsion to note the things that strike a chord of deep feeling in me. Whether what’s happening – what I’m witnessing – leaves me feeling desperately out of sorts of wildly excited I need to recreate it in some way. I need to express that emotion it stirs in me, and stir it, in turn, in someone else. I can’t keep those moments to myself. They’re not just mine. They’re gifts I’ve been given and I can’t be selfish with them.

I just can’t.

Because those moments, really, are the gift. It’s not motherhood itself. It’s not the role and it’s certainly not the title. It’s the little vignettes, every day, that affect you to your very core.

Those are the free gift that comes along with the profound investment that is motherhood.

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