Thoughts on Hard Days While Living the Life I Have Asked For (or an unknowing woman’s prayer)

Today has been a hard day in our household. My son has been sick. I have been sick. Just when I thought we were ready to begin 2012 finally in good health, I touched his skin before bath and his little body was on fire. We have been home together all day with intermittent periods of gleeful play and the need to be held in a way that will be gone soon enough. I am tired. He is better. Our world is righted but still, these are hard days.

Recently, I came across a series of writings in my own hand from a workshop I participated in just after my son was conceived. When he was an early formation of desire, a hope. Our life together is all the complications of answered prayers. Grace with all its hard work. I have been coming back to these words I wrote before a lot. Possibly because I am trying to learn the artful balance of mothering and doing other work that is important to me. In two short years, it is frequently hard to remember, refocus, recapture the patterns, thoughts and ideas that consumed my life in the time prior to taking on this new role of mother.

I come back to this also because even in the hard days there is tremendous joy and laughter. With this mixed bag of the good and the tiring, I try to remind myself that this life I live did not just happen to me. I asked for it. I made it happen. I now think of these words as my meditation on the life I now live. A mantra. The articulation of wishful thinking and truth that lingers even as I am becoming more and more my new self. I am sharing it now because of a number of conversations with women who are where I was then in my heart now. Although, these desired are situated in the particular context of their lives.

Sometimes in a new year what is more helpful than creating new soon-to-be abandoned resolutions is a resolve to look back at decisions made and where they have gotten you.

4/21/2009

In the mirror, I see a woman on the brink. On the edge of having something she imagined. I see her strong and fragile, wanting and yet enough. I see light out of darkness—a chiaroscuro life hand crafted by her and the women she has known. She is covered in fingerprints of hope and desire. Fingerprints that once muddled her reflection but are now new skin for a new life…if she is not afraid to seize it. In the mirror, I see a girl at the end and a woman at the beginning.