Watch Me

If someone told you how often your mama heart would break and bleed

Because you made someone with your body

Who carries pieces of you in them

As you do, of them,

You might not be so flippant about parenthood.

You might not long for babies and bundles and the bright eyes of the future

Staring back at you

As you try to make one impossible decision after the next

To ensure that they are okay.

What should you privilege in these choices?

Love, security, strength, persistence, fortitude, kindness?

How can we be expected to guide the future into the future

With the meager skills we have as humans?

We are only women.

And yet, we are only women who have been forging a future path for generations past and generations to come in ways that would have brought other, lesser beings to their knees.

We shepherd those who will rule the earth along life’s path as if it was our only destiny.

We do this while juggling the mundanity of life’s sticky tentacles of busyness, boredom, and banality.

We do this like it’s our job.

The only job that matters.

The mental load of being a mother is incomparable to anything else.

If you think you know what it is to suffer and you have never made choices that would affect the life course of another,

You may well be mistaken.

If someone had told me that the sum total of being a mother would be to trust myself and the world,

Would I have done it?

Would I have chosen to be tested to the limits of my ability to
love, to cling to life, to trust that good really conquers evil?

Would I?

I have no idea.

Maybe not.

But do I think I have the strength and fortitude to push my way
past fear and go into forever with her?

You’re fucking right I do.

Just watch me.