Super Super Daddy

There is ten minutes, perhaps, a gap. One is watching TV, the other is eating yogurt raisins for who knows how long. But I feel a ticking meter before one of them climbs into my lap and prevents me from typing. It’s an attempt to soothe out the ragged raw edges of this spiky ball of anxiety. It’s prickly and it rolls around my body, taking pieces of me out. My skin feels pock marked and

Goddamn it the phone is ringing

And our noses were cold in the gathering winter twilight and we ride red bikes down the sidewalk: 1, 2, 3, race! And Shea is off, and I am pushing Nat as fast as I can, but it’s a slow stooped kind of pushing, and Shea calls me the slow bike helper.

His blue sweater and blue eyes and red hair. The way he stands out for me, walking back in from the playground with his classmates, twelve other four year olds, but the only one I see is him, and he looks upset, his face red and streaked with tears I wasn’t there to soothe. And does he want to talk about school? No, not right now. So I don’t even know what happened and maybe never will and I need to learn to let go, early childhood is fading into middle childhood.

Nat has been clingy and contrary and testing out what would happen if he didn’t listen, which to tell you the truth, isn’t much because I don’t have the heart to punish a child who hasn’t yet turned two. And I tried to wean him and he noticed and so there has been nothing but breastfeeding today, and I don’t like the insistent pull on my nipple anymore, it feels like greed at his age, and indifference and I am beginning to resent it. I nursed Shea till he was more than two years old, and I nursed him till I was five months pregnant with Nat and he naturally stopped because, I think, the milk changed. Now there is no new baby to precipitate an end to this baby relationship with Nat, and he says, “I’m a baby, I nurse.” Yet the pulling I can feel it in my armpits, he bites and I don’t enjoy nursing him anymore.

“And tell me another super super Nat and super super Sheamus story,” he asks, and Justin starts: “It was dark, so super super Daddy was having a hard time walking,” and Shea says, “No no no Daddy, this is a super super story. In this story, your brain isn’t hurt and you can see in the dark like I can.” Justin pauses, and gathers himself. “That made me sad,” he says to me. “So super super Daddy can see in the dark like an owl, he can hoot like an owl, and see with his bright green eyes and shoot lasers out of his eyes.”

There is too much and the ball of anxiety is starting to unravel and not be so tight and wound up and not rolling around my body as much but there is still some anxiety. But I have to go and there is never enough time in this world with these children, but there is so much time, and the moments spin out, rolling and rolling away from me, like holding something so tightly, you let it go.

#mothering #anxiety #braininjury