Sometimes
It feels like heaven to me
I wish I was the kind of woman who didn’t think about death when she feels loved. Fleeting moments of total soul-crushing joy are usually followed by an imagined, violent car accident, a betrayal, the ending. I cry when I’m happy, not when I’m sad. Everything I love will end and everyone I love will die. I believe in heaven—I do. But so much of this world is so good, and sometimes it feels like heaven to me.
Three days ago it was 75 degrees outside and I was eating vanilla ice cream, kissing my husband, and watching our son play on the grass. This is it, I thought to myself, this is the happiest day of my life. But the happiest day of my life is happening with an almost alarming frequency. Sometimes I wish I didn’t realize how good things are right now. Sometimes I think this means something bad is bound to happen. Sometimes I worry there is a force, or a feeling, equal to my happiness but directly opposed to it. Somehow, it is gathering itself. Somewhere, it is waiting for me.
I know I will look back on my son at this age and wish I could go back and kiss his face. One day, he’ll be a grown man and I’ll be an old woman. Sometimes I can’t wait for the day he will grow up and do things for himself. But sometimes I wish I could go back to the beginning, to the day he was born. I was in so much pain, I didn’t realize how fast everything was happening around me. I didn’t realize I would never see him again at two days old; that day came and it went. I didn’t realize it at four months, six months, or twelve. I didn’t realize that when I stopped nursing him a few months ago, I would never hold that baby to my breast again.
Yesterday was my birthday. I know I will miss myself as I am now. I know when I’m older, I’ll look back on my thirties and laugh at myself, my vanity, my petty, superficial concerns. I know I will remember my husband coming home from work, tall and handsome and smiling. I’ll remember him playing the piano for me. I’ll remember him as a young father, his serious face when he reads and the way he sits at the head of the table while he holds my hand under it.
The days are long and I am tired. I wish I could be fully present in my life every day without picking and pecking and putzing around the house, without noticing the way my right knee gives out on the stairs, the stains on my son’s clothes, the paint chips in the walls, and the cracks in the floor. They say motherhood is more about being than doing. But there is so much to be done. I wish I could exist without wiping down the counters fourteen times a day. I tell myself I’m being a good mom when I do these things. I am looking out, I am protecting my family, I am cutting the blueberries in half. Sometimes I wish I could just be. A woman I know has eight children; I have one. I begged her for advice. “Just enjoy him,” she said. My heart aches.
