By Sarah Sugarman
There is only so much tidying you can do before, by continuing to move things from place to place, you start to create more disorder than was there before you began. Myra realized this on the third night of being alone in her house without her children. There are long term tasks you can undertake instead, less superficial cleaning initiatives like laundering the living room curtains or weeding the children’s drawers of outgrown clothing, but these projects create temporary further disorder and do not come with the satisfaction of a visible change in the environment. And since all Myra wanted to do on her solo evenings, now that the split custody arrangement had begun – after she got home from work, checked her personal email, texted with a friend, did some yoga and ate dinner and took a shower – was to handle her children’s things, and since she didn’t want to feel like a crazy person, instead of climbing into the bed with her younger daughter’s hairs still on the pillow or standing all the way inside her older daughter’s closet right up next to her hoodies and shoes, instead of burrowing herself on the living room rug in a giant pile of their books and toys (because she couldn’t burrow her face in the crooks of their necks), or wrapping herself in their chewing gum and hoarded bubble wrap and science kit slime – she tidied their things. She reached her whole arm behind the row of books on Meggie’s shelf, hugging them forward so their spines aligned like baby teeth. She picked up candy wrappers and sticker backings off Serena’s floor with her fingers, crinkling them into a sweet smelling ball that she let fall like a tear into the wastebasket. She aligned the picture frames on their dressers just so – not to look at their faces in the photos, of course not, just to turn them to be at the best angles to catch the light.
As she worked she made a list in her head of notes to self. When after thirteen years of nonstop mothering you find yourself suddenly not-mothering, and when this lasts for days at a time, when you realize that you are subconsciously planning what will go in their lunchboxes tomorrow even though it’s not your day, when you remind yourself to do a sweep of everyone’s hampers so no one runs out of clean clothes only to find the children’s empty because you did their laundry yesterday and they haven’t been home since – there’s a reflex that needs reminding to shut off. The list of reminders went something like:
- Stay in motion as much as possible
- Eat actual meals
- Plan each hour
- Go outside
- Question your life’s purpose
- Try not to wonder what your children are doing now
Serena was born at 11:25 in the morning after nine hours of mostly back labor which others had told her would be excruciatingly painful and Myra might have agreed until Meggie was born four years later in only three hours culminating in two pushes that tore Myra’s pelvic floor nearly in half, which led to three hours of surgical repair. After the anesthesia kicked in and she went numb from the waist down, Myra lay on the operating table listening to the quiet murmuring of the surgeon and two nurses, all women, huddled together between her knees consulting on how to piece her back together. The flow of concentrated female care made Myra feel cradled in a basket, as later she cradled her second child, for weeks hardly leaving the bed to avoid inflaming her stitches but only sleeping, waking, and feeding the tiny human with its shock of black hair. Meggie was a few months old when Serena came down with the flu and though David was available, because they were still two parents in one household then and were not to reach the breaking point for another seven years, Serena didn’t want him that night, so Myra found herself sandwiched between her two children, one nursing at her right breast and the other draped over her left side radiating heat. Myra’s left side sweated and her right tingled as the milk let down and she anticipated the many hours of night ahead and felt she might soon be drained of all liquid, like a wrung out sponge.
Now, eleven years later with them at their dad’s, the house echoing around her, she was the opposite: an engorged breast, a blocked duct, a swirl of pent up energy swelling her like a balloon. On Serena’s desk was a lava lamp, blue liquid surrounding green waxy bubbles that clumped at the bottom of the glass until it had been plugged in for several hours, warming the contents so that the wax, at first sluggishly, then gracefully, started to rise and fall. It was dark now and Myra had nothing more to tidy. It was late. She was tired. She did not want to go to bed. All that was waiting for her there was sleep. She turned off Serena’s overhead light and switched on the lava lamp. Its blue aquarium-like glow cast a small circle of light onto the desk. Myra knew it took hours to warm up sufficiently for the bubbles to start flowing, but she had nothing left on her list. As the central heat clicked off and the house began its nightly cooling, she settled herself in the chair in the corner of her daughter’s room. It would be a long wait.
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Sarah Sugarman (she/her) is an educator by day and writes by night. She lives with one teen, one tween, one co-parent, and a killer tuxedo cat in Berkeley, California. Contact her at sarahsugarman@gmail.com.