This isn’t one of those motherhood poems…
I want to write those motherhood poems,
That everybody loves.
The ones that speak of tough days and stained shirts,
But a love like no other.
Those poems that make us remember all the good things about parenthood when we’re deep in the trenches.
But all I have right now is empty pages.
And sleepless nights.
And a cup drained empty, and relentless noise from adventurous boys.
All I have is overwhelm, and a battery run out,
And a dragging myself out of bed every morning wondering how I’ll do it again.
A dreading of nights and having to do bedtime solo. Again. Being outnumbered with two different temperament children trying to wind them both down for bed.
Fuse run out
Tea gone cold.
Half damp hair clipped off my face.
A tiredness that just seems to hang off my bones.
All I have is this very visceral desire to walk out the door and escape it all for a while.
Though I don’t know where I’d go. The beach maybe. A bookstore or a library with a no noise policy where it’s so quiet you can hear the pages turning of the books read in corners.
To be in a place that quiet.
With no one calling out to me.
No one kicking or hitting or jumping on me.
No one talking to me or at me, or just saying my name over and over again for no apparent reason but to see how it sounds.
I don’t have it in me to pull into these words how lucky I feel and how much I love them.
Because even though these things are true,
I’m being pummelled by the crashing waves of patriarchal motherhood right now.
And I can’t get up long enough to catch my balance before I’m hit again.
So right now - I’m not offering negativity as some might frame this.
But a reality.
That EVEN though we can love our children and feel beyond lucky to have them.
That trying to be a mother in this space and time is fucking hard. And relentless. And exhausting.
And it can feel hard because it is.
I don’t need to add a ‘but I love my kids’ to this one and I’m not inclined to.
The system is broken, parental burnout should not be a thing.
But here we are.
And tomorrow. We go again.
