Motherhood reveals the wave

The thing beneath everything

Motherhood reveals the sine wave beneath all of existence.

It’s always there, this wave.

The oscillation between joy and sorrow, aliveness and terror, gratitude and despair.

We just don’t always recognize it. Or we do, but would prefer not to.

This wave is the structure of our day, the curved backbone beneath all of life.

The tide goes in and comes out.

You are in awe of your child, you are desperate to be alone.

You feel so positive about the world you’re creating for your little one, you wish you could put them back into your body forever.

You are in love with existence, you are having a panic attack in the parking lot of the grocery store.

Art—writing, music, dance— helps us appreciate these waves. To relish the swoop of the dips. And yet most of us are still taught that the ideal is to ascend the scale of joy and stay there.

So even though art can help us appreciate the wave… nothing brings you into the realness of its undulating existence like motherhood.

Nothing breaks you down, bringing you back into your own wave form, like becoming a parent.

And so on the days when I watch myself swing wildly. On the weeks when I’m lost in grief or disappeared into a joy so deep it makes me feel guilty, I remember that this wave, this movement back and forth is why we came into existence.

That this wave is the hum that creates music, pulls the tides, makes matter.

This wave moves through the tops of the trees, ripples through the earth like the muscles in a snake.

It snakes through us. It reorients, transmutes, changes us.

And if we let it, if we just let the wave be what it is, it will transform us.

I was reflecting on all of this after finding a poem this week I had scratched into my journal my first couple months post-partum.

Words often failed me then, as they still do now. But even when the words aren’t there, the wave still was.

Let the wave come
the love, the 
lostness

let the wave come the
presence, 
the pain

let the 
wave come
the worry, the 
wonder

I zoom out and immediately
snap back in again.

Everything is fragile
I worry about breaking her 
I’m fragile
You’re allowed to 
protect yourself
from breaking.

Some days I feel 
more myself 
than ever
other days I 
don’t know
who I ever was.

Every step I take 
out into the world
is too much

I come back, chapped
and in 
need of respite

I hide under the cover
of this moment
and let the waves
come.