I Didn’t Sign Up For This!

The scratch is at least a half an inch long, a glowing red line dividing the center of my nose. It still stings. It still shows two days out, visible enough that it will likely inspire questions.

What will I say? Knowing me, the truth– half concealed by a layer of humor.

“Oh, you know, just another attack by my toddler.”

Sigh. I examine the scratch again, along with it’s smaller neighbor on the side of my nose. I look at my face in the mirror, tired, and though I am often told I look young, I suddenly feel really, really old.

I didn’t sign up for this.

I wash my hands. Sometimes I am amazed that I turn the faucet on and immediately water flows– it is always there, ready, waiting– no matter how much we take it for granted. Kind of like mommy.

I didn’t sign up for this.

I carried you for ten months, I endured the trauma of birthing you, the physical and emotional scars of caesarean surgery following depletion by hours of labor — a sort of real life tough mudder event; I managed the pitocin-amped contractions that felt like a bear was mauling me, the indignity of castor-oil attempted labor induction and having a ghastly balloon blown up inside my cervix; I endured it all until the moment I couldn’t any longer and I sat, too drained, too reduced to even feel fear of the needle in my spine and your surgical emergence. A whisper — “Somebody help me” — was all I had. Did I get to rest, then? No. I fed you from my body for 18 months, I lost hours and hours and days and God a year of sleep; I lost myself, I lost time and I lost the abs I proudly sported five years ago.

At least this scratch will heal.

Perhaps I should back up a bit. I had just spent a marvelous week skiing — for the first time in 13 years — in Colorado, the magical land where you grew in my body. An entire week with the three of us, mom, dad and you, all together. With daddy suddenly around all the time, your preference for him sliced deeper and deeper everyday, until by the last two days of our trip, as we remained stranded by snow in Denver, you all but cut me out completely.

If mommy comes in the room when you wake up in the morning, you scream:

“No. Go away!”

If I hand you your water, you refuse it, throw it across the room, shouting:

“No, daddy want to do it!”

If it is time for bath, pajamas, bedtime stories it is:

“Daddy, daddy, daddy.”

When you wake in the middle of the night, you call out:

“Daddy!”

Then there is my favorite:

“I don’t love mommy; I love daddy.”

And if you fall and get hurt, you run to him. Always. He hugs and cradles you in his arms in a way I ache to do. I would give anything to feel your cheek against my chest, to dry your tears, to hear you call for “Mommy!” with need in your voice. I want to hold you the way we did for so many hours– don’t you remember all the times I slept beside you, nursed you, wore you on my body in a sling? I miss my baby. I expected this would happen one day. I expected you would hate me as a teenager, maybe as an eleven-year old, but not now, not when the scar on my bikini line is not even three years old.

Daddy is like hot chocolate. Soothing, warm, a bit indulgent, special.

And I am like water.

Stuck in Denver one very cold Saturday, we venture into a bookstore warm with charm. Held in your daddy’s arms, you violently grab my nose. I know that if we’d trimmed your nails before this trip you wouldn’t have scratched through the surface of my skin, exposing red raw blazing flesh. It still hurts.

I walk away, hide in the shelves. Why is it always in public? Isn’t is bad enough that I have to suffer the indignities of being the un-needed mommy at home. Instead, it is always here, with a nightmarish sea of public faces invariably looking at me, judging.

Later we stand in line at the airport with all our bags, hoping to get on an earlier flight home. Your daddy leaves us to take care of something, and you run after him, of course; you run outside, leaving the airport terminal, of course. You do not listen to me when I yell for you to stop. I abandon our stuff and run after you, terrified, muttering the f-word, while people stare.

I didn’t sign up for this, either.

As our plane sets to depart, finally, I read a blog entitled “Mommy, Somebody Needs you.

I wish.

Instead, I’m the unneeded third wheel in my own family. I may as well roll away. But I won’t. I can’t. I will always be here, ready, waiting. Because I am like water. And you, toddler tyrant, are still vulnerable and dependent and innocent. You don’t owe me anything. And you are always changing.

Last night you fell in the kitchen as daddy washed dishes at the sink. You ran straight to me, arms outstretched, wailing, “Mommy!”

I gathered you up, held you close.

“You,” my husband says, our eyes locking with mutual surprise. “She went to you.”

I signed up for this.

I signed up for all of it.

I signed up for all of you.

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