These tender nights.
This soul that whispers,
weary as can be.
Such love shines
upon the pavement of life.
Darlings of mine.
How they take this heart,
how they shatter the light,
that I might be the stars.
I am tidying the mess my three children have made. Motherhood has broken me, today. It has hurt me, it has hurt them, and all because I have failed to be perfect. And so have they.
But as I am down on my hands and knees, moving toys from here to there, I understand that I am in two places at once. I am here, among the chaos, among the evidence that three uncontrollable children live here.
And I am also seven years ago, when I paced around the living room, my stomach contracting with a baby that I would never actually get to meet.
Tonight, I know the gift of my children, despite the chaos they sometimes bring.
Tonight, I understand the beautiful silence of that night seven years ago. The same silence as tonight. A silence that asked me, then, to be fully there with my baby because we deserved that time to know each other.
A silence that lives imperfectly, now, for my children.
Each and every day that I live.
For them.
May they find the hours
of my love for them
strewn upon these coloured pages.
May their names shine with my love,
and may their eyes light
with the truth of all they are.
May these hours,
and these pages dear,
show my children that love is pure
beyond thinking.
Love is…
love
is.
Motherhood has opened my heart in both expected and unexpected ways. It’s taught me that I never truly knew concepts such as shame or guilt before, or responsibility, or disappointment, or sorrow.
And I often get down on myself when I don’t get it right. When I snap at them for being children. When I’m too lazy to be the Mother I know I can be to them.
Then there was today. Today when a situation arose that put my parenting skills to the test, and they were met and exceeded, to my absolute delight.
I have to celebrate this beautiful victory with all of my heart. I have to love myself as much as I love my babies and say: Mum, you did a great job.
I am not perfect.
But today, I was a great Mum.
Who knows what I’ll be tomorrow.
She danced like no one was watching.
She went to that place where all artists go when they create.
She is my daughter and she is five, but actually she is ageless, and it was this beautiful, ageless essence that danced her.
We thought we were there to watch a busker play his peaceful guitar.
We weren’t.
We were there to watch her.
And to know it was a moment so precious that those of us who witnessed it won’t forget.
My darling girl.
She danced like no one was watching.
I’m the sole parent of three tiny humans, this weekend. It’s as exhausting as it sounds, but I have tea and I have chocolate.
And I’m watching Westside Story.
Sigh.
The baby will wake soon.
Tomorrow. xx
Oh, dear rest.
How beautiful to touch your softness, so.
When I, the weary boned,
have assaulted this body
with your skeleton friend, exhaustion.
How sweet it is, this sigh of the deep.
How darling to fall to the earth
and know this motherly love
has filled my day to its gilded brim.
I am authentically myself when I am not at all myself, and it is magical, beautiful, wonderful.
What do I mean by this? Well, I’m not sure. It’s a little too obscure to understand or explain, but I’m certain you’ve felt it. I’m certain you’ll know what I mean when I tell you.
I’ve been reading the BFG to my son. He’s seven, and the best, and so naturally I want to give him the most beautiful experiences life has to offer. Reading is one of those experiences, and the magic of Roald Dahl is…well, it’s magic. There’s no real way to capture that feeling, for me.
And when I read this beautiful story to him, I so often find myself transformed. Every night I become the BFG. I put on my unusually accurate english accent and off I go. I am the BFG (or am I Roald Dahl, it’s hard to really say.)
It’s what I loved so much about acting. Embodying and expressing energies that are not my own is so intoxicating I could easily become addicted to the very thing. The deep booming cutesy tone that flies from my mouth every time the BFG speaks to Sophie: it fills my whole body, it resonates down to the bone.
I so love it.
I so love being authentically me, without being me at all.
I sang about fairy lights as we drove. I remember. My tiny head bobbling about in the back seat while Mum drove us through the darkness to her weekly game of basketball.
‘I love your beautiful songs, Brooke.’ It was a line she’d repeat all the way up until I left home; the warbling six year old I was never did stop making up songs.
Fairy lights. They really were beautiful in the distance. Just window lights shining from houses on the horizon, a lot of them. So many it looked like a sea of twinkling stars dancing beside us as we drove.
I’m not in the most peaceful of places. Looking after a newborn is not the easiest of things, and it’s especially difficult when your body begins to misbehave. Mine has done so spectacularly of late, many thanks to all the regular post birth complaints. Crunch, screech, ache, sob. But life can’t stop because I am in pain.We cannot pause our children, we cannot pause the laundry and the cooking that must be done in order to keep us all happy and healthy.
Fairy lights. I needed something to get me through the chaos and through these achy, sleepless days. And here I am, typing away, every now and then gazing up at our ornamental bookshelf, tired but grateful for the unexpected burst of creativity that found me earlier. Fairy lights. I’ve strung some up around the bookshelf frame and it is the most beautiful thing to stare at them and just…let them take me somewhere.
I love my children beyond it all and I am grateful to even have a home and things to care for. But sometimes I need a breath. Sometimes I need to raise my head above the water and find one of the joys of my soul waiting to soothe me.
Fairy lights. Beauty bringing me back to peace, once more.
Ahh. There it is.
There it is.
It’s funny, isn’t it. How we zone in on the things that happen in life that signal an ending of something and the beginning of something else.
They roll on in, these momentous happenings, and soon they pass: although we do wish we could cling to the beauty of them. We do wish we could hold on to their quiet precious hands just that little bit longer than they allow us to. So we can breathe them in. So we can close our eyes and know something bigger than ordinary is actually happening to us.
That’s a lot of waffling just to get to the point isn’t it, my lovely bloggy friends. And yet I’m certain you all know me well enough to understand that waffling is my way of holding on to the precious moments of my life a little longer than the average human might.
So.
Without further ado…
It’s a girl.
A beautiful, darling, button nose girl: isn’t that just the loveliest thing?
She’s been flip-side of my belly for a week and a day. It’s been a foggy time. A time where my hormones have screamed abnormal things and my rational side has begged to make it all feel a little more normal than that. But I am perfectly okay, and that is just about all I am asking of this post birth phase.
I am being so, so, so well cared for by a husband I love even brighter the second time around. I am kept busy giggling at my other children who tumble around, daily, and so often remind me of tiger cubs at play (especially when the tiger mum nudges them away and gently snaps at their tumbling bodies, in order to pull them into line.)
Life is both foggy and good, for now.
And to me, that is perfect.
Perfect.
Just the way it was meant to be.
brooke-cutler.com 