Mother Heart

My patience is growing shorter with the days.  Some afternoons my compassion feels as thin and delicate as the leaves that crunch and snap underfoot, she tests a boundary and I crumble.  I hear my voice whipping like a chilly wind and I think, "who said that?"

Was that me?

I am hoping this is just a season that will be merciful and turn quickly.  In the meantime I am perfecting the art of the deep breath.  The one that draws sanity in quietly and expels the noxious waste discreetly - the breath that never points to blame.

And when I forget, or I can't, or I don't want to proceed gracefully, I snap.  The brittle sound is a sting in the ear and a pebble added to the growing wall between us.  Because we will never be linked as tightly as we once were, will we?  The strong threads will remain and find their way through the crevices, linking us for always, but never as tightly.  The wall will grow to ultimately define where I end and she begins, and the first pebble is buried in the soft and tender pulp of my mother heart.  It grows from there.  Stone by stone reverberations carry to the fragile core.  And with each addition my heart is strung along to the tune of our evolution.

Today in a tired, ragged moment I barked with a sharp sliver in my voice,

"STOP IT!"

My throat constricted and curled around a short noise of irritation.  The words were neutral, even necessary.  The tone was a tight hard slap in a soft open face.

She is testing, testing, testing, pushing all the time.  She is finding her power and hurling it at the world to see how far it goes.

I just don't like it when she takes the point of her little heal and grinds it down against the bony ridges on top of my foot.  The foot that is planted so that I can reach awkwardly around her toys and reach the faucet that is pouring water too hot for her stretching hands.  The foot that yelps when she grinds down harder with all of her weight, wiggling and moving careless and unknowing.  I don't like that.

"Hey!  Mommy, don't say that.  Just say, "Soleil, I don't like that."  OK?"

I take a deep, practiced breath.

"Soleil, I don't like that."

"OK, Mommy.  I'm sorry.  I won't do that again."

Except she will, because she grinds her heal into the sensitive bones on top of my foot almost every day, when we are standing close together, when she forgets.  But next time she does I hope I breathe sooner and remember her tone, how she laid that stone gracefully, gently with love.  How she looked up at me and saw my mistake, how we unwound a slight thread and gazed together at the distance between us.