The first thing I notice as I wake up is that my left hand has fallen asleep, pinned under the undulating ribcage of my sleeping 6-year-old.
There’s so much more math in mothering than I expected, fractured selves and deltas. I’m doing some ancient, primal calculations about how bright it is in the room, what tone of sunlight streams through the linen curtains, to estimate the time. Between 6 and 6:30am, I decide.
My right hand rests on top of his body, my fingers the evens to the odds of his ribs, applying the pressure I’ve perfected over (more math: 365 times 6, roughly. I’m multiplying, carrying the three) two thousand mornings waking up together. My hand on his body has divined a calculus of its own, some exacting physics equation: (pressure x time)/patience.
I want to start my day, empty tick boxes, full of demands and judgment, to attend to. Moving my hands, one, both, means starting my day not-alone. This paralysis, me here in the quiet of my own thoughts but with my body sacrificed to this position, is equal parts co-dependent and self-protective.
This math is easy: I crave the silence and only earn it if I’m willing to surrender my physical autonomy. But the harder math is right there, exponentially noisier: in what sense has my body ever felt my own? Not at 17 or 29 or 41, whose primeness could not protect me from capitulating, from coupling, from procreating. Each time, my body merged with another. I am doomed to contain multitudes.
Lying there in bed, the urge to be up, out, away becomes too fierce, even though I know well the costs. If I am awake and out of bed, he will follow suit.
My mental ledger is filled with tallies in favor of just getting up and relenting to whatever happens. Yet I still choose to move slowly; maybe this time I can sneak away unnoticed. I keep my top hand exactly in place, applying a bit more pressure as I force the mattress down with my lower hand, creating space that didn’t exist a moment prior. He shimmies a little, sensing my motion, the fraction of me he has lost. I wait, count the minutes I am losing in this effort to preserve future minutes alone. I try again, start slowly but then rush it, like always. His eyes pop open, find mine quickly re-closed. If he senses my betrayal, he chooses to overlook it. He rolls over to be closer to me, mumbling a clip from his dream world. My internal world retreats as his consciousness permeates our shared space.
Once both awake, the math of logistics presides. My mind is crowded. Assemble, arrange, delegate, disregard. He finds me every few minutes, a question about the day’s schedule or a missing library book, a breakfast request, a gentle complaint about yesterday’s lunch. He stands next to me, his bare foot sweetly resting on top of mine, the way he always does when he feels nervous. The clock continues, unsympathetic to his agenda or mine. I spend the drive to school calculating and recalculating how almost-late we might be.
After drop off, I fill what could be time alone with attempts to feel less lonely. My therapist asks, “Where do you feel that sadness in your body?” and I don’t understand the question, having been trained over a lifetime to deny, to sever the connection between feelings and flesh. I feel it all over, nowhere. A thin layer of dried honey on my skin, a faint sheen in the right light, tugging when pulled taut.
That night, tucking my son into his own bed, he sweetly asks, “One more hug?” I’m happy to give it.
I say, “See you in the morning, love. I hope your dreams are sweet.”
“See you in the night, you mean,” he smiles, knowing it’s true. We do this dance, fueled by optimism and denial and a pre-nostalgia that I can’t shake. How many more nights will he crave the safety of my embrace? 100? 1,000? Even at its maximum, such a small fraction of my own years.
We are on borrowed time, he and I. I am resigned; my body is not entirely my own, won’t maybe ever be. Still, by the next morning, as I again attempt to extricate myself from the weight of him, the pins and needles will come, reminding me that, in some ways, I’m entirely alone.
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- A Calculus of Its Own - July 22, 2024