Breaths Exhaled

Children are something that many of us have in common, some are new to parenthood, and some are finishing up and watching them go off to college. There is so much to say about kids, yours are always the best of course, and then all those friends and family around you. The special set of challenges that each new person presents to your life as they arrive pink and screaming is mind altering- a new personality, a new schedule preference, a new perspective that will form before your eyes into something you may or may not agree with. There are so many wonderful ways that they impact us, teach us how to be, wrap their little fingers around our hearts. I never doubted that I would love being a mother to my boys, nor did I worry that they would grow up and disappoint me. I knew that whatever they did, whatever they became would be unique and beautiful and hopefully, as my Grandad says, "an improvement on me".

The one thing I did always worry about with my parenting was that I would have to do it alone. I used to look at single moms and say, "I don't know how they do it. I would not be able to." I mentally took that time to check off of my list, "been nice to my husband today", and breathe deeply. It never really crossed my mind that I would be in that predictament because we were such a great team, and had so many things that were rich in our relationship. So, this last year has been really different, entering into the realm of "single motherhood". As a widow I don't feel the stigma of a failed marriage, but I do feel the looks and stares as we go anywhere as a family. I walk quickly through the supermarket saying to my entourage of 3 trailing behind me, "stay with me, walk quickly, don't touch that." And they do, it is amazing. But it is that way everywhere I go, 3 in the backseat, 3 in the yard, 3 behind me going to the buffet at the restraunt, 3 getting dirty looks as they laugh at the library (shhh!) I have not really known how to appreciate it, or how to feel comfortable with this life attachment that is even closer, demands even more of me than it did when I was a stay-at-home wife and mother. I have felt the weight of it and that it is heavy to have such responsibility with no balance from my parenting partner. I have felt the imposition of it in that I can't go out, can't meet new people, can't go do anything alone without a babysitter. But as I have cycled through these phases I have tried, clumsily, to define what it is to have this new place in motherhood.

Parenting does not feel any longer the way that it did before and like most intangible feelings, with the change has come the awareness of what it has always been. Although a spouse is someone that you share your life with and know intimately, a child is part of you. They are your extension, they are your exhale. I walk, I run, I sit, I sleep, I eat, I dream, and always, I breathe out. I look behind or beside me and my breathe takes shape, with tousled blonde hair and 6 flailing arms and legs, sweaty, chaotic, beautiful. Children are our exhale, and when we step away from this place, they are left behind us to first weep and then to expand in their lives and fill it with the beautiful parts of our dreams that were left behind.