Both Sides of the Coin
Parenthood in a nutshell, in the span of two hours on a random Saturday.
The first time I woke up as a 40-year-old, it was 3:30 in the morning. Hi Mommy, said the little voice an inch from my face.
Actually—I don’t know what the little voice said, because I was incepted five layers deep into an oceanic sleep, the kind that my now-40-year-old body desperately needed. I slowly swam to the surface and realized that my five-year-old had made the journey all the way up a flight of stairs, through the pitch black of nighttime at our northern Michigan lake house, and was now crawling into our bed. Fully awake now, I pulled her into my lap and rocked her for bit before I broke the bad news: she needed to go back to her own bed. We held hands as we made the trek downstairs. I pulled up her covers and watched as she sweetly fell back asleep.
On my way back upstairs, I glanced out the window and stopped in my tracks. The moon had set, the sky was clear, and the stars were on full glittering display. The Milky Way made its milky swoosh across the sky. I tried to absorb as much starlight as I could, beaming a silent thank you to the universe for so many gifts, mainly: the stars, and my children, who woke me up so I could see them.
The second time I woke up as a 40-year-old, it was 5:30 that same morning. I was instinctually launching myself out of bed and down the stairs without fully realizing why. I met my seven-year-old halfway, her eyes full of fear as she gasped and coughed. I can’t breathe!! she rasped. The steroids she’d been given for croup before we left Chicago had, for the first time in my parenting experience, failed to magically cure her. I tried to hide my panic as I soothed: You’re going to be OK (but an ambulance will take 20 minutes to get here, if they can even find us) Everything is fine (or we could speed to the hospital, also 20 minutes away) Take deep, slow breaths (but really, what will we do if this doesn’t work?).
I shut us in the bathroom and ran a hot shower, but the steam wasn’t making a difference. She forced breaths through her swollen throat as I carried her upstairs, threw open our bedroom windows to the 40-degree morning, and prayed the cold air would help.
Magically, it did. Her breathing cleared and deepened and she fell into an exhausted sleep. I could hear the birds waking up, could practically feel the trees exhaling their precious oxygen. The soft waves on the lake went in and out as I stared at my daughter’s chest moving up and down.
I again beamed a silent thank you to the universe for the gift of unseasonably cold weather. But also for the clarifying terror of parenthood—which is a different kind of gift. It’s one thing to see the stars. It’s another to be pumped so full of adrenaline and then relief that you feel as if you are a star, your fiery starlight coursing through your blood and burning away all the bullshit because all that really matters is that your children are OK.
So that’s parenthood in a nutshell, in the span of two hours on a random Saturday. Beauty and terror, joy and dread, both sides of the coin. As I lay in bed next to my daughter, recovering from my journey to the stars and back, I thought about the decade I was leaving behind. The one in which I became a mother. In which I watched my kids grow from helpless babies into slighty-less-helpless elementary schoolers. In which, through a lucky spin of the coin, I somehow landed on my feet, balanced between the beauty and terror of parenting.
